I wanted to take a moment to thank each and every one of you for hanging in there and keeping up with this blog.
While I no longer add to this blog regularly, I wanted to update you on what has been going on with my life since I opened Annienygma.com.
For a while I didn’t pare down as much as I used to; part if it has been winter blues, while part has been the fact that I reached a plateau.
With the end of the year nigh, I did eliminate some stained shirts, old books and software, and a lot more digital clutter with the unexpected death of my big hard drive. My closet actually has room to shift items around now, I am wearing my better quality clothes (that had been buried behind my worn out casual ones), and I think that soon I may be able to transfer my pants to hangers and free up two drawers in my bedroom!
Spending Money to Save Time
I have decided that sometimes you need to spend some money to save time and make things easier; my computers now are all running Windows 7 with Microsoft Office as a result. Having the same operating system on all of my computers will make maintenance easier, and Microsoft Office has saved me hours already when I go to create and submit articles online. Something about OpenOffice forces me to spend a lot of time fixing strange errors whenever I upload articles, so that alone has saved me a lot of time. Also, I am now reading all of my emails in Outlook now instead of visiting the individual websites; the use of IMAP enables me to keep my emails synchronized online, so I still have the ability to read my emails anywhere, but now instead of going from site to site to check all of those accounts Outlook takes care of it in the background. It even handles Twitter, enabling me to send and receive my tweets while I’m checking email, saving me from having to visit yet another site.
All of my blogging is now done in Windows Live, meaning that I can blog to any of my accounts at will with just a few clicks; as a result I will try to update this and my other blogs more often.
I feel like a traitor to Linux by switching so completely to Microsoft products, but the current round of software does everything I need and does it well, so for the sake of simplifying my life I am switching entirely over to Windows, at least for a few years. I’m not giving up on Linux entirely; I still plan to play with it, just not use it in a production setting.
I’m sorry Linux, but you don’t have the integration capabilities or the ease of use that I require at this point in my life.
For a detailed summary of 2010, please visit this post on my main site. I tried to cover everything that I could think of in there.
Well, I’m off to explore more of 2011. I hope each and every one of you has a wonderful year in store!
Peace,
Annie