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For years I’ve been dreaming of a time when I would be free of “stuff”. Sure, having everything can be useful, (Who do You ask when you want to borrow something?) but unless there’s a real clear order for everything, it’s just wasting space in your life. When you ask yourself “Where did I put that?” too often, you should understand that you have a problem. There’s a nice survey here to determine your Clutter Quotient. My favorite part was:

6. Your Acquiring Habits
You see something shiny. You buy it. Then you buy another for a spare, in case the first shiny thing gets dull. You cram both into your home, where you have hundreds of other once-shiny things, all of which are now dull, but you promise yourself to polish them one day. You buy polish.

This quote pretty much defines what I’ve had to put up with over the years. It’s not only one person’s fault, it’s really everyone wanting to hold on to their stuff and seing theirs as more valuable than what others want to keep. To pinpoint more specifically, I see two problems:

• Emotional attachment to objects: Throwing away needs to be Okay! Stop looking at me like I’m commiting a sin because I suggest that it’s time to get rid of the 20 year old alarm clock because the tape deck doesn’t work and it’s door is being kept shut with scotch tape.


• The blame game: Alice wants to throw something out that belongs to Bob, Bob says Carol is taking up too much room, and Carol says both Alice and Bob keep more useless things than she does.

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I haven’t posted in such a long time. The past while has been really busy for me with CUSEC and other stuff to work on. Now that CUSEC and CUTC are over (they were a blast!) and I have made sure to have no other commitments, all I have to worry about is ‘just’ school. This should be a vacation! (Yeah, right) For the moment, I have some catching up to do on school work, then maybe I can spend some of my new found time looking for something to do after I graduate in a few months and put in extra time on the SOEN 490 project.

A few weeks ago I finally decided to start contributing to CUSEC 2006. My main area of focus is the website: http://cusec2006.soen.info (Update your links please!). I think I’m keeping on top of it pretty well. I went with a Wordpress base, hoping that this would cut down some of the work. Up to now, it’s been a good experience. I’ve made many changes to it, especially to make it alot less blog-ish to fit the purposes of CUSEC. I learned some CSS and even kept it W3C CSS/XHTML compliant.

The dates for the conference are January 19-21, 2006 and it will be held in Montreal. The organizing team is a small but dedicated group. We are always on the look-out for more helping hands. One area that I’ve been asked to recruit for is the Logistics team. Logistics takes care of plans surrounding the actual event, such as finding suitable hotels for attendees and speakers, renting equipment for the conference, managing the conference layout, putting together the gift bags for speakers, taking care of the registration table, looking into different possibilities for the CUSEEC souvenir item, etc. If any of these areas hit home with you, or you’d like to help out in some other way but aren’t sure what, I’d love to talk about it with you.

I became a CUTC ambassador for Concordia this week. Yes, I can’t seem to stay inactive for very long. Last year’s CUTC was very well organized, and after being an ambassador for 2005, I was invited back for 2006. They are also looking for a Regional Head Organiser for Quebec, I am considering the position but if there’s anyone out there who is interested, let me know and I can put you in contact with the appropriate person.

As for CUTC itself, it’s definately worth the trip to Toronto and with the awesome deal I hope to score by Concordia funding, it shouldn’t make a huge hole in your wallet either.

Yay! I finally found a position for my summer work term. I’ll be working at Oz Communications. I’ll be doing QA, working on the server side of their product that allows for instant messaging in mobile devices like cell phones. The company itself is located downtown in the Windsor Station, it’s an old building but whoever designed the office space did a good job because it has a cool modern look, but still kept some original features like the stone walls in the reception area. Also, I’ll be working with another student, Kriggs or Michel, not sure what I should call him at work.

I start on tuesday, so I still have a few days of “freedom”but I am eager to start and see what it’s all about. Woohoo!