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A bit of the mundane life of Kirk; I'm not sure if it's my increased use of OSX and some of the paradigm shift it required, but I now don't have the immediate dislike of XP's "Group Similar Task Bar Buttons" option. I started using duing some stress-y times last week, when having a giant plethora of task bar buttons started to create a stress response.

Part of it is a kind of "letting go". In my old way of thinking, each task was some bit of activity context that I might want to return to...now I just try to take care of things before leaving that window, and most windows should be utterly disposable. There is a certain pleasure in right clicking on a taskbar group and clicking "Close Group" to remove a huge swath of windows.

It's kind of weird to even be thinking about this quite so much. And I'm not sure what to make of my own conservatism about changing my personal mental models to fit the technology I'm using....I guess it's like admitting my old models were inferior for the task at hand, or that ultimately computers aren't as flexible as we might like.

UPDATE: (yes, I'm still thinking about this. Damn, this is terrible blogging, just a step above "what I had for lunch today"...) Come to think of it, using more computers on a regular basis might also be part of this. It used to be I had two computers in my daily life, home and work. Now with a few laptops to choose from... you don't want to get too hung up on what windows you had hanging open on some other machine.

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Oddness of the Moment

--On the plane to Dallas, Wired's coverage of the upcoming movie once called "Snakes on a Plane" had me laughing out loud. Mostly this "poster" and the wigu cartoon they included.

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Quote of the Moment

Humor is just another defense against the universe.