The Collector Of Small Things

Forget what the some of the anthropologists have to say about gender roles like 'hunter-gatherer', with the males being hunters and the females being gatherers and yada yada yada which was maybe true once upon a time. But whatever be it, the female of the species do have a mothering instinct that is rare in the males and they can immediately smell it out if something is amiss. :-D

Anyway, noticed that I do have a lot of the gathering and accumulation characteristics, mostly what can be categorized eventually as junk (by those who don't understand it :-D). Old papers, notepads with notes taken eons ago, photocopies, unnecessary bills/receipts, old tickets, pens with no caps, used refills, manuals for things long gone bad, books, bags and not to mention an array of electronics spares which are almost never used, wires, cables, non-working items, boxes, nuts, bolts, drill bits, screwdrivers etc which are squirreled away and intended to be taken out on a rainy day which may or may never come. :-) The word "useless item" never appears in the vocabulary of a species like me. :-D

Not an easy thing for me to throw anything off just like that. I save and guard things like the worker ants in "A Bug's Life". A lot of brooding happens before a decision to throw certain things out, if any. When a cleanup and dump happens at home, it happens in my absence. I get to review only a few items before they hit garbage. I audit and cleanup my collection(s) once in a while and do it with immense glee as I immerse myself in that with all the material strewn around rankling everyone as it takes hours for this exercise to complete :-)

Guess that all these have crossed over to the software side as well. On an inventory of the software on my laptop, here is what I found installed additional to the standard software, and that is not required for my work.

Web Browsers - Opera 10, Safari, Google Chrome, Iron, Mozilla Firefox
Mail and Messenger Clients - Yahoo! Zimbra, Yahoo! Messenger, Skype
Audio/Video/Images Management - VLC Media Player, MP3Tag, Kate's Video Joiner, Videopad Video Editor, Bink and Smacker Video Tools, Audacity, Paint.NET, IrfanView, Picasa, DVD Styler, Movica, GIMP
Indexing and Web tools - Google Desktop, uTorrent, Free Download Manager, Privoxy
Editors/IDEs - Gvim, Notepad++, NetBeans
PDF Management - PDF-Xchange PDF Viewer, Ghostscript, PDFill
PC/Desktop Management - Sysinternals Suite (Microsoft), FreeCommander, VirtuaWin
Emulators and Virtual Machines - Cygwin, Sun VirtualBox (with Solaris 10 VM), VMWare Player with 2 VMs (Ubuntu/Fedora Linux)
Transliterators - NHM Writer, Baraha Unicode
Other Tools and utilities - RocketDock, 7-zip, TrueCrypt, XMind, JetStart, Direct Folders, MagicDisk, TeraCopy

Not that I don't use the above, I use at least half of them regularly and are in fact lifesavers (Hurray! to all those open sourcers and freeware folks) All the tools are useful in one way or the other. There are tons of other app installers which get installed and then are removed, but stay in my downloads directory or in a backup portable hard-drive for a potential reuse.

And on mails, used to subscribe to umpteen journals and could not cope up with the deluge of newsletters every day of the week. Accumulation inevitably happened and my Inbox(es) swelled mad (peaked at close to 2000+ Unread status with another 500 unread, but with read status :-)), but I have a policy of not deleting any mail before reading. And so, I just moved the mails off to a sub-folder every now and then on a guilt of having a cluttered Inbox and there they sat, for the all important <Enter> on the mail and a roll of my eyes over it and a hit on the <Del> key or the appropriate mouse clicks for their 'vimochanam' (redemption) from their trapped lives. Used to religiously move mails into appropriate folders once I read them, but laziness has gotten the better of me and they all stay in a single folder. Personal email account mails do get sorted into folders still. Some traits remain.

Guess learned habits die hard and wired behavioral habits die harder!!! Mmm... Let me go and see Linda Goodman and see if I can blame it on my sun-sign. :-) :-)