I’ve really agreed with the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix’ line of thinking. I think there are a number of reasons for that, but the primary one is that my world and environment is constantly changing and therefore the chances of a component or situation remaining for long enough for me to use that statement just never occurs. To give an example, just this last week we decided to move a printer downstairs for Sharon so that she doesn’t have to keep running up and down stairs when printing things out. That simple move lead to a a whole sequence of events that culminate in my re-organizing parts of my desk, which now has less stuff on it, because I’ve moved it over to the tri-level printer table. This in turn has led me to re-organize the power strips under my desk (I managed to free no less than four sockets, and improve the untidiness of the cables). That just triggered a whole kettle of fish on the location of some paperwork and my active work folders and so it goes on. That’s just my work environment. This morning I’ve been planning ways of improving the IT here. There are a couple of things which aren’t quite working how I’d like. For example, the main mail server uses post-acceptance spam filtering – ie, it gets delivered and then filtered by a Perl script (which calls SA and ClamAV), but I can’t afford to shut the mail server down while I reconfigure. Meanwhile, I’m running on a reduced firewall until I can sit down and reconfigure ISA 2004. And at the back of my mind I’m aware that I need to reconfigure some of the other hardware to fit in with a few upcoming projects. Why am I an optimization tart? Well the last time I did any of this was just about the start of the year, and I did it when I installed the kit into the new house in September too. Even now, I’m thinking about what happens next and what projects will start in September and how that might affect the current configuration set-up. And there’s a list on a few pages of improvements, extensions and new features I want to add to the Intranet. Not to mention the fact that about half of the links on that Intranet don’t work properly anyway…