Fwd: Purpose

This blog more than the others is for my own uses. I want a record of what causes me trouble and the solutions I find so that I can: get a recognition of patterns of problems, solutions, and their sources; be able to retrieve solutions that I've forgotten; find answers to problems in the process of collecting my thoughts on them; and stopping obsessing about problems.
I didn't expect the last two results when I started writing this. I'm the most pleased about the latter. I have a tendency to work for long periods on problems that are not critical. The idea is that I want some type of perfect environment and that if I achieve that I won't have to spend any more time tinkering. This is, of course, not possible. I will always be dealing with software that in some way does not work the way I want it to. Even if somehow this magically did occur my computing environments are not stable. As soon as an upgrade was done, I would be back to endlessly tinkering. There is also the problem that every change to a computer not only brings it to a less common and more difficult to diagnose state as well as creating the risk of unintended consequences.
Here are examples of this that have caused me problems this month-  Wanting so badly to get bullets working in Mail that I spent an hour on it, called Apple Tech support for another hour during which they erased all my mail, and now spending many hours trying to recover the mail; Wanting to have all my email centralized, therefore enabling POP on my Yahoo account, and removing all the files which over the years I had diligently made online backups of. There haven't been bad consequences but I've also wasted many hours trying to get Iphoto to import; dealing with Greasemonkey script bugs, dwelling on Apple's replace vs. merge for folder copying, and trying to create an AppleScript that won't do much for me.
Writing about these helps me stop obsessing. When dealing with a problem I create a mental list of possible solutions. I have to remember this list so that I don't retry something unsuccessful and to figure out what I haven't done. By putting it on paper I allow myself to forget it and can convince myself that I've tried all the avenues- or occasionally in the process of collecting the thoughts I realize there is something I haven't tried. There is great relief here- these aren't things that I work on for a few hours but things that my mind returns to again and again over the course of months.
I think occasionally I will find a solution that will be useful to other people and I'm glad of this. What would be even better is if they saw how pointless much of this is and decided to stop tinkering themselves.