qptech blog

I come up with great ideas all the time - at least they seem pretty good at the time. But later, when I'm trying to do something with the idea, I can't recall it. I've seen virtual sticky note programs before - you probably have - there are hundreds of them. It's a pretty simple concept and programming such a utility is not at all technically challenging.

But never before have I found such a thing to be very useful. All they serve to do is clutter up the desktop, so I'd hide them. Then forget to show them again until long after the notes have become irrelevant. So I never really used them.

But one of the desktop managers that I'm using, Xfce, includes a notepad utility (at least in the default gentoo install). So I played with it a bit, but it was mostly the same as before.

Then one night, I had finished reading/writing email for the day, closed out my chat sessions, and written my blog posts. Then I got another Idea for a blog post. Knowing that I would completely forget it the next time I would sit down to write a post, and not wanting to log back into blogger and take the time to draw the idea out into a full post, I opened a sticky note and jotted down the idea. Then I forgot about it and went to bed. A few days later, I was surprised to find the note again. It persisted through multiple log-ins and reboots. I still have not composed that post, but that is because data related to the post has become unusable - new data must be gathered before that post can be written.

But now I have 4 notes related to blog posts and other endeavours. Will I get them done? Who knows, but at least with the notes, I won't completely forget what I had been thinking.