For Christmas, I was quite pleased to get a Zen Stone Plus in my stocking. I'm one of those people - the ones who exist between platforms. (I lost my true allegiance decades ago, and have been a switch-hitter ever since.) One of the things this means is that I do some things by hand that other people - the loyalists - are used to having done automatically.

So there I was, Christmas afternoon, moving playlists from the iTunes on our Windows machine onto the cute little non-iPod. Grab, drag, copy.

The process immediately reminded me of Jorge Luis Borges' riffs on mirrors.

Advice for clearing literary clutter | Ask MetaFilter

There's a thread on Ask Metafilter about book-centric clutter that's getting lots of good comments right now. It started when matildaben asked for "practical and creative systems for reducing the number of books I own," saying:

The vast majority of my possessions by weight and volume consists of books. I would like to develop a system for getting rid of them that will have a very practical, behavioral, methodical approach to the emotions that compel me to keep them...

The solutions people offer are thoughtful and suggest that many of the better ideas are coming from fellow bibliophiles who've struggled with The Book Problem.

Like several folks in the thread, I think this comment from occhiblu gets to the heart of what makes clutter such an emotionally complex problem:

• Dynamism.com - Next Generation Japanese Notebooks and Electronics - New-to-me geek gadget site, highlighting stuff not easily available in the US. Very fun.
• IGDA - Articles - Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work: 6 Lessons - "Productivity drops immediately upon starting overtime and continues to drop until, at approximately eight 60-hour weeks, the total work done is the same as what would have been done in eight 40-hour weeks."
• NPR : GPS Goes Mainsteam - Your author would be one of those alluded-to persons who uses GPS as a "crutch." I could get lost in an empty bathtub with two St. Bernards and a sherpa guide.
• THE PRAGMATICS OF HUMOR: Representing Communication - "Cleese...says, 'I think any time I see a possibility of a misunderstanding, I jump on it.'" Cleese once brilliantly pointed out that Basil Fawlty wouldn't be nearly as funny if there weren't people standing around watching him make a fool of himself.
• Bacon Cheese Baconburger - "You may think you've done a lot of strange things in your life, but until you've put slices of raw bacon into a food processor at 10:30pm, you really haven't even scratched the surface of strange." [via MeFi]
• The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks - I'm a proud "admin" for a "related" but "unallied" Flickr "group" that I "like a lot" called "Quotation Mark" Abuse. (thanks, mathowie)

MacBreak Weekly 70: Happy Life Day!

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Hosts: Leo Laporte, Alex Lindsay, Andy Ihnatko, Chris Breen, Merlin Mann, and Scott Bourne

It's the Macbreak Weekly Year Ender!

Here's a direct MP3 download of MBW 70.

And here's linkage to a few of the things I mentioned (adapted from this episode's show notes):

I thought for sure the one thing that would nag me about the iPhone when I finally got one was its lack of a to-do list app. To my surprise though (and maybe it makes sense, as I'll explain), now that I have an iPhone I haven't felt the need for a to-do app at all. It's an egregious omission for most people to be sure, but for me it's turned out to be a non-issue. To understand why, I need to provide some context.