Fixing Little Annoyances

It's amazing how good it can feel to fix some small thing that's been bugging you for a long time. I fixed two of them today, and I feel pretty darn good about it.

One is that my workstation at home has a noisy hard drive. Between the anti-virus and anti-spyware software on the machine, each looking to read or write from the disk every few seconds, the hard drive is ticking away constantly. In a small apartment, this ticking is very noticeable. For example, if I wanted to watch a movie, I'd have to put the computer into hibernation to keep from having it distract me. When the computer was on, the only way to mask it was to play music, which is not always practical. To fix it, I put the main box in the kitchen and ran the necessary cables over to my desk, which is fortunately not far away. Now there's just enough barrier between the ticking hard drive and the living/dining room that it's no longer noticeable.

The other little annoyance was that when I listen to music on my phone with headphones, something I do often when walking places, I didn't have a good way to carry the phone. The phone's holster doesn't have any cutouts for the headphone jack, so I would plug it in and put the phone in a pocket or upside down in the holster. Neither way is as comfortable or as securely held as when the phone's in the holster. Since the holster is leather, today I just cut a strategically placed hole in the bottom of the holster and the headphones now fit perfectly and I can listen to the music while the phone is securely in the holster.

Each of these fixes was just a few minutes of time and really easy to do. I need to strive to recognize easily corrected other annoyances in my life and fix them. The rewards are so great for such little effort.