Feels just like starting over
We have a pretty good IT setup at work. We all get new laptops every two years, and care is taken to bring our documents & settings from old laptop to new.
Today, as a cure to some drastic ills with my laptop, I agreed to having my hard drive completely wiped. It was extremely liberating to have five years of cruft completely obliterated. To be fair, most of what I do on a daily basis lives on remote machines, in source control repositories, or is otherwise stored externally. And I did back some folders up to CD first.
But all those files that I couldn’t quite bring myself to wipe out because maybe I’ll need them eventually? Gone. All that documentation for products I haven’t used in 3 years? Gone. All that stuff I bought from the iTunes music store? Gone. All the odds and ends, the various conflicting and half-abandoned folder organization campaigns, the photos from a group offsite in 2000? Gone, gone, and gone.
I feel so liberated. It will be interesting to see what I miss. From a software point of view, I’m only reinstalling stuff as I need it. In the first day, that has been, in this order,
- Firefox
- Secure CRT
- TextPad ( the best $30 I ever spent!!! )
- iTunes
and then when I got home
- NewzCrawler
- w.bloggar (to write this)
I will eventually be wanting the cygwin utilities so that I can use bash instead of an DOS prompt, like a civilized human being.
I’m wondering how long i’ll be able to hold out before I have to install anything else.
As far as replacement mp3’s, so far it’s been two purchases which came in the mail over the weekend, A Star for Bram and Obliteration Pie (come on, it has Robyn doing Funkytown!). And some Rasputina
July 12th, 2005 at 6:03 am
as somebody who used to go around saying that textpad was the best $30 i ever spent, i urge you to check out edit+. i still use both; textpad has that open-as-binary feature, but e+ has more robust regexp support, extensible syntax and highlighting for various filetypes, oh, just tons of rocking stuff. now I tend to say that the best software I ever bought was all (at the time of purchase) well under $100, including edit+, textpad, winzip, cooledit (r.i.p.), paint shop pro, etc.
July 12th, 2005 at 9:54 pm
Good grief, I don’t even want to ask why you’re editing binary files with a text editor.
Textpad has extensible syntax and highlighting; not great, but ok.
The one thing lacking in my life is a really good visual diff tool. If edit+ has that, I very well may give it a look.
July 14th, 2005 at 6:51 am
Here’s my list of must-installs, FWIW: Sygate Firewall, AdAware/SpyBot/Microsoft Antispyware, Cygwin in full, Firefox, PuTTY/WinURL, XChat, GAIM, OpenOffice, Automachron, Acrobat Reader, Google Desktop. All freely available.
July 14th, 2005 at 8:14 am
Ah, see, Acrobat Reader, Ad Aware, Spybot are on the IT Dept.’s disk image; they were all pre-installed so I didn’t mention them.
Google Desktop gives me the creeps, so I was happy to have it uninstalled.
In the past two days I have installed a few development tools specific to proprietary software systems I work with, PuTTY/WinSCP, NcFTP, and Natara Bonsai, which is an outliner that syncs with Palm devices. Of course, I haven’t installed the Palm software yet.
July 15th, 2005 at 5:19 pm
Nah, you gotta have Google desktop. It’s the enabler for all the cruft you just got rid of. At work, anyway. At home, no thanks, but less madness there.
Textpad lacks many of the chord-key combos that I’m used to out of the box. I’m sure it’s configurable enough that I could change it if I wanted, but it’s easier to find another editor with what I’m used to. Textpad for most stuff, and when you absolutely must open that entire GB+ file, UltraEdit.
July 15th, 2005 at 5:21 pm
Sorry, that second Textpad should have been Editpad “Editpad for most stuff…”
July 20th, 2005 at 11:00 am
I don’t do it daily or anything, but if you have to write (or modify) code to access a binary file for some reason, it’s pretty handy.
It doesn’t. I use the open source winmerge which is … um … workable. Useful enough for certain things that it’s in my “standard toolkit,” but it doesn’t inspire me to proselytize the way edit plus does.