Spring cleaning

I'm doing spring cleaning while rearranging furniture to optimize my space. In doing so, I've temporarily disconnected my TV, AV, and network, for nearly 24 hours, and will probably continue to keep the TV and AV offline for another day.

Some observations while doing spring cleaning:

-- I still have too much shit. I'm starting to realize that I really don't like having too much stuff. So I've decided to adopt a rule: buying requires getting rid of something.

-- Going through my books, I was reminded that my education was far greater than most, on issues that'll never grow old. I have a book on the history of american urbanization, conservation and the gospel of efficiency, american environmental history, and Julian Simon's The Ultimate Resource. These are books that I'm getting rid of. The ones I'm keeping, include Jane Jacobs, and a bunch of philosophical books, as well as dozens of architectural, graphics, industrial design eye candy.

-- So many books are rather useless, once you read them. In the case of poetry and classics, I think going digital is much more useful. Other books are nearly instantaneously rendered dated, such as guide books. The most up to date info is always going to be online, making most of these guide books worthless.

-- I can live without my network online, so long as I'm not doing work. News, emails, blogs can all be accessed from my phone. The downside from keeping my network offline, is that I can't access all my digital content on my network RAID drive.

-- I really need to get rid of my massive drafting table... It makes my place feel smaller as it sucks space up all around it.

-- Truly, digital magazines are the way to go, as you can download it and read them while offline. They don't take you much space either, so it frees up bookcase space.

-- Holy cow, there is so much dust! I can't wait to get rid of my carpet, so as to make dusting a really easy chore rather than vacuuming and then carpet cleaning -- that'll help me get rid of another item taking up space, the carpet cleaner machine. It'll also make doggie accidents a lot easier to clean up.

-- I have too many chairs. I dunno how this happened, but I have far too much seating for my tiny space, and they can't be folded up and put away, either.

-- Without TV and my network up and running, I focus much better on the things I need to do, and get more things done.