As a casual gamer, I game. I game with Cedega and I game with Wine. Occasionally, I’ll also enjoy a native game or two.

While enjoying an exuberant game of WarCraft III, I will occasionally have some downtime and use it to check my messages. This requires switching from the game to another application. In the ol’ Windows days, this would be done with an alt+tab. You’d hit the two magic keys, blink your eyes and hope that the screen changed states by the time your eyes opened. Of course, it never would. You’d always open your eyes with disappointment, and wait a couple more seconds until Windows woke up and decided to do something useful.

Although Linux is faster with the window switching to begin with, desktop switching is in a league of its own. When I was a young and unwise penguin, I scoffed at and avoided virtual desktops. Also, in the same streak of naivety, I always used to maximize my windows — but that’s a different rant altogether. But now, by allocating different purpose to each virtual desktop, my productivity flourishes. And I can save a few precious eye blinks — dry eyes be damned!

One for web browsing and chat, one for music and file browsing, one for development or gaming, and one to bind them all.

When I play some WarCraft III DOTA on desktop #3 and I get pinched to death by the Sand King, I can spend the 40 seconds it takes to respawn productively by replying to pending messages on desktop #1. And quickly switch to desktop #2 to change songs before going back into battle.

There was a slight issue of Gaim opening its new message windows in whatever desktop was currently active, but that’s easily fixed with awesome desktop managers like KDE by restricting the application’s window class to a specific desktop. Yay.

Someone remind me, why did I start a blog? After (what I’m reluctant to call) “maintaining” a blog for several years, why do I continue? It’s not like I have anything to say to the “public”. I say oodles of things to each of you who read this individually, but I never have anything to say to all of you as a group. You don’t belong in a group. What are you doing here?

Today I witnessed a coworker getting advised to start a blog, which made me think to myself “wait, no one ever asked me to start a blog — why did I?”

Or for that matter, why do I read blogs which also have nothing to say?

It’s not entirely true, I do have things to say. I just don’t say them by the time I don’t want to say them anymore. *Looks at three incomplete pending posts*