X-Developer Cross-platform development in C++, Flight Simulation

Getting rid of things that annoy me, part 1 of n

There are two kinds of computer users: "Closers" and "Tabbers". You can tell them apart by pressing Alt-Tab (Cmd-Tab on Mac) on their keyboard: Closers have only a very limited number of programs running in parallel, and if they need an application to accomplish subtask X, they start the program, do X, and quit it afterwards. Tabbers instead have a long list of running applications, and if they need to do X, they Alt-Tab to the program, do what needs to be done, and then tab back.

(Example of a tabber)

I'm the kind of person who closes programs running in the background. If you Cmd-Tab on my Mac, you usually see three programs: Finder, because thats what runs the Desktop, you can't close it, QtCreator, because that's the tool I work with and Chrome, because I've always 5-10 open tabs of documentation and reference manuals.

On Windows, I used to be a "systray-nazi". No one f*cked with my systray! If you were a program and you installed a "speed launcher" in my systray, you got nuked from my harddrive immediately.
Today, even with 8 Gigabytes of RAM, I still close every process and service that I don't need right now, even if it needs only 640k.

And that's a principle that applies to my whole life, not just to my computer. I'm the kind of person who gets nervous when he owns too many things. Every thing I own is like a background process running in my brain, occupying 640k of memory to remember where I left it.
Using a little kitchen sink psychology, I assume this comes from me losing a lot of things when I was a child. I was always scatterbrained, and every week I would forget something, lose my pencil case when changing classrooms, forget my phone card (no cell phones these days!), forget my lunchbox, lose the gym bag on the bus and forget the writing pad with my homework. The latter was particularly annoying, because I didn't take homework assignments too seriously anyway, so then I had ACTUALLY DONE my homework but forgot the goddamn pad or folder at home. I grew up getting more aware of the things I have to look after, and me coming home with my mother looking at me saying "where did you leave your X?" became more rare an event.

("You what?" I lost my yo-yo. "Well where did you have it last? "Eh! If I knew that... I'd still have my yo-yo.)

But this came at a considerable waste of computing power in my brain.
Right now, I have kind of a list of all the things I own in my head, and I know where each of these items is. Each item on that list is like a background process, because it occupies a little bit of my brain. Perhaps 640k. And you know what I do with background processes, right?
That's the reason why I hate this list becoming too long.
So I try to not have too many things I don't really need.

Actually, there is exactly only one item that I really, really, really need. And thats the RSA-key for my repository server. I've stored that quadruply redundant on every harddrive and USB-pen that I have. If the whole building burnt down, leaving me with nothing but what I have in my pockets, all I need would be a computer with internet connection, and I could resume work. If and only if my apartment burns down at the same time my hoster goes out of service, I'd be in trouble.

Why am I writing this stuff? Because I today decided to kill one of those brain's background processes of mine, and get rid of a thing that's been getting on my nerves for a long time. I decided to sell my car. Since I've moved to Frankfurt, this thing was parked for two months. Not moved an inch. I live 300 meters from the train station now. Yesterday I was forced to start my car and drive a few kilometers. The goddamn thing runs worse than a cement mixer, because the mass airflow meter is fried. I have no idea why, it worked okay last time I checked. The spare part isn't expensive. Replacing it is so easy, even I could do it. But I don't want to dedicate a single thought anymore to this thing. So I came back home today, parked the car, went up to my apartment, switched on the printer, printed two "FOR SALE" signs, went down to the car and put them in the rear windows.

I however did bother a few minutes to browse the usual used car websites to look up an adequate price. And I realized that this thing has cost me more than 4000€ since I bought it, only for owning it, not driving one kilometer. Not including tax. Not including insurance. Only loss of value. And by the way, gas is currently $8.05/gal (€1.64/ltr) in Germany.
What few people realize, is that the TCO of a car is obscene. And loss of value is the biggest factor. All people talk about this for computers or smartphones, but with cars it's much worse. A car is even worse than a Windows PC in this respect.

Here's the deal: For the money I save by not having a car, I could easily afford a "Bahn Card 100". That's a yearly subscription for the german railroad system. You pay about 3800€ per year and then you don't have to buy a train ticket, you just jump on any train and go wherever you want. Many people think 3800€ is expensive. It's not. It's cheaper than owning a car.

And I don't care about broken mass airflow meters anymore. I don't care about having to change tires. I don't care about having to find a parking spot (a REAL problem in German cities!). I don't care about gas prizes going up and down.
This frees up so much resources in my brain, it's incredible.
Plus, I can read stuff while going somewhere. Try that with a car

Next up on the list of things to ged rid of (2 of n): my new Dell Notebook. It's fast, it's shiny, and I bloody hate it. Because Dell doesn't know how to build a good notebook anymore, but that's for a different blogpost. My old Dell Latitude D620, that's a great notebook. I dropped it to the floor a few times already. I spilled tea on it. It has so many scratches and dents, it looks awful. And it's too slow for X-Plane 10. But I love it. Because: It. Simply. Works.