My email inbox. Sheesh. You'd think that after spending hours. ..no, DAYS creating and tweaking rules for Mail.app, you could have a set-and-forget, self-maintaining inbox. But...Nope.
Especially since on a mac, you first need to put in all the effort of adding the addresses of incoming messages to your Address Book.app and creating groups (to be used by Mail.app rules).
But...No. Still a mess. My inbox ends up as the place where everything that 'slipped through the cracks' of my extensive rule-list ends up. I think I clean it up every 4 months or so. On a semesterly basis. I currently have about 300 500+ unfiled unfortunates in there.

As I have begun to work more intensively with the SpotLight Attributes (thanks to both old-skool tagging apps and newer OpenMeta offerings) I have noticed that the list of SpotLight Attributes (accesible through the refine search UI in finder search window: /command F in Finder/ click on 'kind', select 'Other') has grown SOOOooooooohhhhhhhhhhh long.

So a while ago when I was figuring out how to get OSX leopard to do fast user switching I noticed that desktop icons (in the Finder sidebar) were different between accounts.

The new 'test' account had the 'default' icon that looks like a thumbnail of the actual desktop--not the 'special folder' icon that is is the default for the Desktop folder that you would see in your Home folder...

One of the things I always disliked (never blossomed into full hatred, given that I did not have a UNIX/LINUX background) was how all my processes or workflows open at once quickly became a mess. In particular, large workflows involving many windows were hard to manage.
In OSX, (thanks 'NIX-trolls, I know y'all had it first, long time ago) Exposé/Spaces offer a (less-than trouble-free) way to have multiple desktops open. What it does not offer is a way to successfully bind applications to a given space. Partly this has to do with the implementation of Spaces as a 'feature' of the Dock.
Hunh?

My committee members have asked me to write up my research question.

The difficulty I have with expressing my research is deeply related to the latency I have permitted myself with describing my practice.

For me, research is synonymous with learning. In the social sciences and arts, 'discovery' is not as it is in basic science, or even applied science.

For a scientist, whose 'method' is nailed down by 100+ years of reified practice, research is experimental design, execution, and reporting.

For a social scientist who is trying to play the part, method is less adulated, venerated, and gilded calflike. It is various, not homogenous. It is a big question-mark.

If naturalism, empiricism, scientifism are not the basis of your method, what approach offers an adequate foundation?

Long ago I began exploring phenomenology and more recently have been trying to understand how it can be used as method.

So, I have decided to stop whining about how the tools 'just are not there' or 'just have so many shortcomings'.

From now onward, I am building a system - a dependable (ok, ill settle for pretty reliable and mostly stable) environment within which tailored workflows can be semi-automated to the best of my ability, and to the furthest extent possible with the available tools...

To open a Finder window for any folder in the Stacks area of OSX 10.5 dock:
   1. Left-click the icon in the dock while holding the Command key.
Thanks: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071111202112177&query=osx...
To reload the Dock (if the dock icons go wacky, or Spaces freezes up):
   1. Launch Terminal
   2. enter the command: killall Dock

So after a very long hiatus, I am back blogging.
Im so excited about what I am doing now, that I can hardly type. My brain keeps running ahead to all the posts I want to write.
But lets start with where I am right now.
I have just picked up an old project and started a few new ones.

These tools are the basis of much of my workflow design efforts.

Much of what I have been doing with 'FlowSpaces,' 'Mindful Media Management' and 'MetaData³ [managing, munging, & mobilizing]' projects could be called system customization