Dan Cederholm is a staunch advocate for the breast pocket. I rarely use mine, if I have one (and if I do, it’s usually as a convenient place to put cutlery). But another pocket holds its place in my heart, even if it does always force me into difficult decisions.

It’s the left-hand pocket in a pair of trousers.

Trousers have always had two pockets in them, minimum. (At least, all the ones I’e ever worn have, and one of my favourite pairs had six on it). These two pockets are mounted on the front, one on the left, one on the right. For me, the purpose of the right-hand pocket has remained constant, but the left has changed its role over time – and always been invaluable.

To begin with, only the right pocket was filled, and I put my wallet and my keys in it. Nothing in the left pocket permanent – its duty changed with time.

When I was 13, I got glasses. I didn’t wear them all the time, so my left pocket became home to my glasses case. As I got older, I tended to wear them more and more, and they saw the inside of the case less and less.

When I was 18, I got my first mobile phone. That instinctively went in the left pocket. That was the final nail for the glasses case. I had just got new glasses I liked wearing far more than the old ones anyway, so I resigned myself to wearing them full-time, and kept the phone in my pocket. (The fact I no longer carry a glasses case explains why, if you know me, I have a habit of placing them upside down on the table in front of me once I’m seated).

I could check I had everything with three short taps – wallet in right pocket, phone in left, keys in back pocket. It’s a bit harder now: my phone is so small I sometimes can’t feel it, and I put my keys in the right pocket too ever since they started wearing holes in the back of my trousers.

Now, I sometimes put my iPod in the left pocket, running the headphones up under my shirt or jumper. There’s not quite room for both it and a phone, so I have to put the phone somewhere else – and somewhere I’ll be able to get at it quickly. I don’t always wear a jacket. So where should it go? I am now, irrevocably, confused.

I cannot help but pine for a simpler time, when I didn’t need to be contactable, didn’t want to drown out the drone of the commute, and did not need to carry my own money with me.

I think I should be a hermit. Either that, or buy more jackets. They are, after all, just pockets with sleeves.

On my desktop I have a folder entitled “Odds and Ends“. This is for all that stuff that I don’t want to throw away just yet, but that doesn’t belong in my documents folder, either.

Basically, it’s stupid .avis, some PDFs of interest, and reference material I’ll never need again. This morning, I cleared it out, and deleted:

• The Hutton Inquiry.
• A Whorechalking card.
• A Sony Ericsson T610 manual.
• Some icons.
• Manuals for products I do not own.
• PDF of Lambeth council tax rates.
• Some crap mophos.
• A Cheltenham restaurant sample menu.
• Some “amusing” avi files.

See? Utter rubbish.

It’s quite nice to clear out. I’ve been reading 43Folders and been feeling the urge to streamline things – more time doing, less time organising. My desktop is now nice and decluttered – temporary files and aliases only – and now it’s time to go down a level, and clean out the folders. This is only the beginning.

Tiddlywiki is a wonderful, wonderful implementation of a wiki. It stacks entries one on top of another as you view them, so you can always see your history; entries can be closed when you don’t need them anymore.

When you see them stacking up, you begin to see how the information in the Wiki itself is structured; you can edit them in-place without distubring your train of thought.

The problem with Wikis is that they don’t display train-of-thought so well. Well, this one does, and I can’t wait for someone to find the killer app for it. It’s also not lost on me that it looks more like a traditional columnar weblog than most other wikis. Everyone gets weblog design; hell, everything looks like a weblog these days. Applying it to a wiki isn’t so stupid, and Tiddlywiki implements it fantastically. Who’s going to get on with the killer app, then?

I was reading the recent Guardian interview with black erotica writer Zane over breakfast the other day. I commented to the girl on the reference it made to the practice of “72”ing.

(It’s like a 69, but with three fingers up the ass, apparently).

The Girl didn’t get it. She was trying to work out how two human bodies could represent a 7 and a 2 whilst engaged in, you know, sexual acts.

“No,” I said. “69 + 3 = 72“.

“Ah”.

I was clearing up after breakfast, and had a look at what now covered the pad we write the shopping list on. Lots of two digit numbers, little cursive things, with little hands and faces.

All having sex with each other.

Every morning she thinks up new challenges. Apparently 34 looks quite good. I liked the look of 38, myself.

Think about it. Nice and cuddly.

It’s my birthday on Sunday. I got in from work and chatted to the Girl. “Oh,” she said, “I made you an apple cake”.

I don’t really like apple cake. Or tart. Or pie – unless it’s swathed in custard.

“Great,” I said. I went into the kitchen.

I hadn’t fully understood what she meant.

Dorkiest birthday cake evah!

So I’ve finally signed up to a del.icio.us account. I probably should have done this a long while ago, especially given the way I think, but for some reason was put off. Anyhow, so far, I’m very impressed, and am taken by how simple it is to use.

I’m going to experiment this week; basically, anything I see that I might want to linklog, I’m going to plop into delicious. At the end of each day, I’ll run through what I tagged, and if it’s worth putting up here, then I’ll do that. It’s a preliminary filter, as it were; also, not having to log into MT saves time and concentration.

There’s a lot flying around my head at the moment. I’ve been rearranging filing systems, recently; my work computer is now remarkably tidy, and I’m about to start sorting out the Powerbook. Launchbar is part of that process; so’s this. Cleaning out my Mac desktop is going to be quite hard work.

I think the next part of the de-clut is a holiday and lots of fresh air.

I bought software online for the first time in my life today. Handed over my card details, got emailed the license key.

It’s not exactly shareware, given that the unregistered product is crippled, but it’s significant, I guess; I’ve been using shareware since the age of six, and have never registered any until now – mainly because it usually required sending credit card details to the US.

Which, in my case, at six I did not have.

Anyhow, I bought Launchbar. From the first time I used Launchbar 4, I swore I’d buy it when it was done. Unfortunately, for about the past six months, I’ve had to download a new copy every 30 days. Not any more. Today, I downloaded Beta 9, and found that I could purchase it (in order to uncripple it). So I did.

It’s a remarkable piece of software, indexing not just files, but information and metadata galore. It’s easier just to try it than to explain it, but now I’ve got it, I can confidently state it pretty much makes many items that are in my Dock obsolete. I grew up on command lines, but my mastery of *nix is pretty lousy. Now, I can let my fingers walk through my entire hard disk, finding contacts, files, apps, and internet searches.

If you’ve got OSX, I really recommend buying it. It’s changed the way I use my Mac, and made my Dock a lot tidier.

Kitchen looks fantastic. Two lunch options each day – one veggie, one not – delivered straight to your desk. Order the day before. The archive of past menus is mouth-watering, with a variety ranging from Oriental and Middle Eastern to nursery food. Oh to sample their calzone.

So it’s a shame it’s based in Nottingham, then; my taste buds are tingling just looking at their menus…

Also of note: I finished off a few rough edges on this site at the weekend. We’ve now got individual-entries sorted, but also a new About page, and the Archive page now also works correctly. The monthly archives are also done.

In short: we’re just about finished. I got rid of the grey background; it wasn’t doing it for me at all. Black on white. How it should be. Also, if you’ve got Gill Sans installed, it’ll make a very lovely main body copy font.

That’s the decorating done. Now to fill these walls.

Every now and then, as part of my job, I get to work on building websites – either tinkering with what exists, or creating new pages. Sometimes, I even get to work on brand new ones. This week, I’ve begun work on a new site, and rather than tinkering with the old design for another year, we’ve started from the ground-up. In this case, we’ve also gone with a web-standards based design.

And suddenly, I’m into the learning game, starting from scratch again, checking out resources and remembering what tag goes where. This is the kind of thing I love; knowing what result I want but having to remember how to do it, and thus having to research again, and hopefully drill the code deeper into my memory. The site is nearly done; it still needs content and final tinkering, but the tough stuff – basic layout, design choices, usability – is all there. It’s been really satisfying to work on – seeing something come to fruition – and even though I’ve worked with standards-based design before, it was remarkable just how fast it all developed.

This was in part thanks to the Web Developer extension for Mozilla Firefox, which makes life wonderful. Lots of great shortcuts – for turning styles on and off, outlining block-level elements, disabling images, validating code. If you don’t have it, it’s worth getting Firefox for. Easily the most impressive feature is the ability to edit the CSS of a page live in a sidebar whilst the page alters in realtime in the main window.

This feature is what really saved time in development. I sketched out the page with pen and paper first. Then, I worked out just how many div tags that would require, and marked up dummmy content with the divs. Then, I loaded the page in firefox, and started writing the stylesheet direct into the sidebar. It thus took very little time to get the draft of the layout created, and then I could further tinker with styles and add nested styles with great ease. I’m really proud of the result, and will probably link to it in due course. It’s a huge saving in terms of download time compared to the previous site. Also, there’s a certain glow to be had when you see the phrase “THIS PAGE IS XHTML 1.0 (TRANSITIONAL) COMPLIANT!”

This site started out as an attempt at compliance; it didn’t last, as everything got a little sloppier as it went on. Hey, at least I started with good intentions, and at least it’s better than not attempting. Perhaps the thing that made me happiest with the new site was the method of development; starting with markup, styling later, and managing always to keep it tidy. It’s the cleanest code, both XHTML and CSS, that I’ve ever produced. I hope the site serves its purpose as well as its code is neat.