Housekeeping

It's amazing how much stuff a person is able to amass, even within a short amount of time. I'm constantly faced with the task of trying to keep my apartment in check, and questioning whether I need to keep something or not. The struggle seems to be something of a never ending streak of losses: you just can't win! I've been playing around with an idea of revising my apartment a bit in a desperate effort to clear some more room for coats and jackets and streamline everything by putting books behind some type of glass doors to keep the dust out. But in a small apartment it seems to be incredibly difficult to find the type of furniture that you actually want and that would fit the needs that you've specified.

On other frontiers I guess a bit of housekeeping is also required. In the digital world it seems that you also have to be fairly rigorous to ensure that you throw out the old as you introduce the new. I took some first steps by removing obviously dead and/or outdated links from my blog (it seems that quite many people lack the persistence to keep up a blog, so I got rid of all links to blogs that haven't been updated in a while).

An additional challenge has also appeared with the emergence of social networking sites: how do you prune your network? It isn't as trivial as throwing away an old shirt, since removing links may be a politically sensitive issue. "It's nothing personal, but I don't want you in my social network anymore" just seems sort of blunt and only works for the persona non grata -types, who you don't necessarily want to deal with in the future. But otherwise I guess it's just a matter of more carefully grouping and segmenting the network. Or something to that extent.