Jake’s Life

Well, for those of you who read my protected post, my schedule and district is back to normal. Some things came to light and all is okay now. There’s more to the story, but that’s for a later time.

I usually wake up around 5pm, and up until the loss of daylight savings time a few days ago it was light around that time. Now I’m back to waking up in complete darkness, which takes a toll on your perception of time. It feels weird, like my entire day is gone.

Night time is more fun anyhow.

I’m sure I already know who is going to respond to this, but I need a sounding board for a few things. They’re still processing, but once they’re done bouncing around I’d like for them to land somewhere. I know what my close friends feel about it but I’d like a few outside opinions on it.

E-mail me if you’re willing.

I love the Adam Corolla show, and whenever David Allen Grier (DAG) is on he brings Peanut with him. Funny shit…you’ve got to hear it!

You guys may have noticed the lack of derogatory comments left on my web site lately. This is due in part to two reasons: I am now moderating all comments posted (so if your comments don’t appear immediately, don’t panic), and I have banned certain IP addresses from accessing my site altogether. This hasn’t stopped things completely, but it has obviously caused a sharp decline.

I decided to unlock those IP addresses tonight, mainly due to the fact that all of the comments blasting me for things I “do” at work or about who they think I am is actually positive. I won’t go into how, but I think they already know why. Comments will still be moderated though for the time being.

Well, I’ve started organizing a lot of things in my life now that I’m out of school and have extra time to dedicate to things. I was waiting until I found the SD card to my camera to post some pictures of examples, but it’s clear that it’s missing (or floating around in one of the cars somewhere). Instead, I’ll settle to describe things in writing, so get ready to enter Imaginationland (and be patient because this is gonna be a long one)!

Workspace

I wanted to get my workspace better organized, so I went out and bought a simple two-level inbox. On the bottom is ongoing items and files, and the top are my current projects. I also adopted the rule that if I don’t use it at least once every day or two it doesn’t stay on my desk (adopted from Lifehacker). Instead it moves to a nearby drawer, and if I don’t use it at least once a month it gets tossed or stored. I bought a lamp so I don’t have to have all of my lights on during working on my nights off (and besides, I sat between my ceiling light and my desk, so I could never see the keys in the dark).

On my nice new clear desk sits nothing but my inbox, laptop (and external Firewire drive), and lamp. I also have started to keep a piece of paper handy which I check everyday and determine if an item is worth following up on or not. Once that’s done, the paper goes in the trash, as do most other papers I accumulate each day, week, and month (bills going in the fireplace, of course).

Technologically Organized

Now that things are cleaned off, I moved to organizing. My laptop was first because I usually spend hours on it per day. All of my photos, music, documents, everything was organized and tagged using Vista’s tagging feature (which I love by the way). Everything I don’t see myself needing right away got sent to the external drive, including all of my movies and TV shows that were stored on my laptop. This was done with my Box.net account and web hosting account too (freed up about 250 MB there!).

One other thing I thought of the other day, which I’m surprised I didn’t think of before, is that I’ve started scanning and digitally archiving sensitive documents should anything ever happen to them: Birth certificate, identification, tax papers, vehicle and health insurance cards, debit and credit cards, everything gets scanned so that I at least have a visual copy of it.

When I was in college (you know, last week) I used a Web 2.0 service (Notely) to help keep organized that had sections for courses, grade tracking, task management, and calendaring. This is overkill for me now, and ever since I bought a Windows Mobile device I’ve started relying on Outlook more and more. I’m still not sure what I will continue using for task management and my to-do list, so I’m trying both Outlook Tasks, and Remember The Milk (which has a mobile version as well).

Bedroom

We’re getting into the colder months in the Pacific Northwest, with our first night below freezing last week. I wanted to move my furniture in the bedroom around to help make it warmer, so the dresser that was blocking the vent was moved into the closet. (The closet…I haven’t quite gotten to that yet.) This also freed up room for my laundry basket to sit out where I could toss clothes into it instead of on the floor.

I also have the daunting task of going through all of my drawers to get rid of things I don’t use anymore, as well as doing the same for the boxes, hangars, and other shelving in my closet and bedroom. I’m probably going to start with my main set of book shelves, taking down all of my textbooks to go into storage (besides the ones I still reference regularly…yeah I know, I’m a loser). I have some more photos of my mother that I want to put up near her urn, and some other things like DVD’s, XBOX games, and computer games. I have a set or white lights up that I use when it’s night to help it not be so bright in my room that I want to re-hang up…Sandro said it looked like it said “1861″ last night, and when I saw what he meant it started to drive me nuts.

And yeah, that’s it for now. I hope that someone could glean some usefulness from this post…