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Fred "Rerun" Barry once commented here.

March 12th, 2004

Your Desktop

Do me a favor. Go read this Denver Post article on spam… or at least, look at the photo. Is there anything odd there?

That’s right: there are way, way too many icons on that guy’s desktop. There must be over a hundred.

The messy computer desktop thing is something that it’s a little hard for me to wrap my head around, but I see it all the time – at work, in newspaper articles, and the like. It seems that people aren’t quite sure what to do with a Start Menu or a Dock, and thus throw stuff on the Desktop. But I bet you a solid number of Mr. Messy’s icons have automatically been placed there by installers. A quick survey of his desktop shows dozens of folder shortcuts, all of which look identical.

While I’m sure this works for some, something like this would make me fear my computer. “Where’s the icon? Okay, let me visually sort through all 193 that are on my desktop… hmmm….”

Me? My desktop has four icons right now: hard drive, a ZIP file, one representing the music CD in the CD-ROM, and one for the iPod. That’s it. And it works nicely.

Posted in Technology

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