Tell Gus what you think, but remember- you are in his home. Be a good guest.
You're not the only one.
And how insane are you? Probably the best answer is to just pitch all that crap. But then I'm the interminable packrat myself, so of course I'd have to spend 2 days going through it all and culling...
Posted by Joe at January 24th 2005 09:50 PM
I am so lazy. I have "New Folder" and "New Folder2" Each containing quite a bit of crap.
Posted by Matthew Sievert at January 24th 2005 10:23 PM
Mine is called "Downloads"... The reason why I let the content of the folder grow is that I'm afraid that if I throw something away, I WILL need it later, though, of course, I almost never give a second look to a big part of the files that end up there.
I am looking forward to the day where I won't have to go through it. I'm thinking technology will eventually catch up: Spotlight is a step forward since I could (ideally) let the mess accumulate and be sure (yeah, right!) to find the stuff again when I need it. Virtual folders/Saved Searches would help provide some order on top of the mess but won't address the mess itself.
It might not matter wether or not the stuff is organized if you can find what you need. I still wish Apple would implement Stacks/Piles though since these would help me automatically organize my stuff... There's some degree of overlap between Spotlight/HFS+ Metadata and Stacks/Piles though and it might actually be even possible to implement Stacks on top of metadata...
Posted by Chris Laprun at January 24th 2005 10:24 PM
You think you're bad. I throw everything on my desktop. It gets really messy, but I don't mind. Until I have a presentation, and then it's just distracting. And I don't want to leak confidential information. So I create a folder named "_clean" and throw everything on the desktop, in there.
The problem is, the cycle repeats. And repeats. And repeats.
Currently, they're nested 22 levels deep:
wolf$ pwd
/Volumes/Island/wolf/Desktop/_clean/_clean/_clean/_clean/_clean/_clean/_clean/_clean/_clean/_clean/_clean/_clean/_clean/_clean/_clean/_clean/_clean/_clean/_clean/_clean/_clean/_clean
Posted by rentzsch at January 24th 2005 10:40 PM
The digital equivalent of sweeping it under the carpet - make a new user account and leave it all behind. You can switch to Mr Hyde mode if there's actually something important in there, or if you just want to wallow in crap. But ultimately, you know you can ditch it. :)
Now i warily keep an eye on my desktop "Deadpool" folder, because having one alter ego is hard enough :)
Posted by monkey dancing shadow at January 24th 2005 10:43 PM
It strikes me as a near universal phenomenon.
I usually start out with a "downloads/documents" pair, but then after a bit I end up with "desktop cleanup" which becomes too specific and ends up as "stuff."
Current solution?
Bigger hard drives.
Posted by Mad William Flint at January 25th 2005 05:54 AM
now that I think about it, the right solution is probably to burn a couple dvds, put them on a shelf, delete the stuff, then see how long it is before:
a) you reach for them.
b) something yaks 'cause the files are missing.
Posted by Mad William Flint at January 25th 2005 05:56 AM
My favorite has always been Andy's "Tomb of the Unknown Document"... I usually end up with 4 or 5 nested folders named "Desktop Shite" but I eventually sort through them. It's also probably a bad sign that on my laptop I have a partition named "Dumptruck".
and some weird folder named ".pR0n".
Posted by kweed at January 25th 2005 06:08 AM
I leave everything on the Desktop 'till the screen's full. Then there is 5min of sorting: DMGs to /Download, interesting stuff to /Documents, a lot gets trashed, the rest to /Expires. That folder can be deleted without losses, which is a comfy thought, but usually it just sits around. And when I'm in the mood I look at all the old stuff and delete some.
But since I freak out when remembering something but not quite what it was even /Expires isn't excluded from Retrospect.
Posted by Tobias Weber at January 25th 2005 06:40 AM
I've got a "to consume" folder on my desktop. It's all pretty much Channel9 videos that insist on playing at a low bitrate (even though they're high bitrate), so I never feel like watching them.
Evidently some stuff to print too. I also need to check this more often.
Posted by Leland Johnson at January 25th 2005 08:14 AM
Mine's called " Web " (the space is to keep it at the front of sorted lists). URLs and files from the web go in there and are sorted approximately biweekly. Except for the eight months of the year when I'm taking classes. Monthly then.
-Ben
Posted by Benjamin Stiglitz at January 25th 2005 10:52 AM
You're not alone.
My stuff-folder is called "deskhell" and gets burned to DVD every other month when it reaches 4.5G
Posted by Magnus Bodin at January 25th 2005 12:00 PM
On the Desktop I have a folder 'files', inside of which 'images', 'music', 'text', 'torrents', 'movies', 'stuff', helps to find what you're looking for when you know it's in there /somewhere/. If I find I need to get rid of all the mess on the Desktop still, in a hurry, everything goes into a folder F.O.D. (Found On Desktop).
Having a 'Projects' folder helps a lot with random files; it's subdivided into customers, then into their projects. I've got stuff in there from AGES ago that I'll NEVER need again but.. you never know.
And then there's the 'Store' where all the dmg, sit, gz and rar files go of everything software. When it loads up to much I copy it to another partition and create a new one. When the other partition gets full I throw out the oldest Store folders (they're numbered).
But my growing CD collection of burned files, computer backups and other stuff is ONE HORRIBLE MESS!!! :-/
Posted by MSpreij at January 27th 2005 02:38 PM
Back when *I* had an apple //c we didn't even have hard drives. We could only afford one 5 1/4" drive. We had to constantly switch disks and we *liked* it.
Posted by H. Monkey at February 5th 2005 08:24 PM
Mine is called 'clutter' and believe me, it is. 18GB.
Posted by jcburns at March 1st 2005 04:47 PM