Eighteen inches by sixteen inches. Roughly two square feet, of which about 40% is taken up by a 15” MacBook Pro. This is my desk. Well, it’s actually a folding table. And it’s in a tiny bedroom, in a tiny two-bedroom apartment, occupied by four people. That’s not a lot of room to work.

At my job, I have a 27” iMac, and a full-sized desk. For what I have to do there, I can make good use of the space. I can keep two browser windows open, side-by-side, or a text editor, and a browser window. Trying to do the same thing at home is a little cramped—but doable. [1] I’d rather be in the office when I work at my job, because it’s a space more conductive to what I have to do, both in terms of hardware and environment. Studies prove it.

At home, when I’m working for myself, it’s a lot easier to fit everything into two square feet, or a 1440×900 display. Working like this, you have to work lighter—less stuff plugged into your machine, for example. [2] Run your software in ways that maximize the space available. Lion’s full-screen mode is made for this, but there’s other tools out there that help as well. Moom is a neat tool that hijacks the Zoom button to display window positioning options. You can even set it to resize your application window on a custom grid. It’s the closest you’ll get to a tiling window manager on OS X.

Another application that helps me maximize desktop space is TotalFinder. This is a small extension to Finder that adds tabs to the UI. It’s especially handy when doing heavy-duty file management. Open a tab for a source, open a tab for a destination, and press ⌘-U. Suddenly, you have a split window, with both your folders side by side. If you’re old-school enough to have used Midnight Commander, this will be instantly familiar.

Putting things away when you don’t need them, or aren’t using them is essential when working and living in a small space. The same goes for a computer. Spirited Away is an old, small, simple menu bar app that hides windows after you haven’t been using them for a while—one minute by default. You can tell it to ignore an application, but I typically allow it to put everything away. It’s just easier and more relaxing to step away from using something to find a clean desktop when I get back.

You don’t need these tools to work big on a small space, but they help. At the bare minimum, you need to just know where your windows are, what apps are running. You need to use tools that do one thing exceedingly well, and you need to think hard before adding something else to your environment. No matter how powerful, how fast, or how much storage our tiny machines have, they work better and last longer if you run with a lot of head room, and it makes your life easier too.

When I switched to the Mac back in 2005, I didn’t anticipate that I would be spending a significant amount of money on software. I came from the Windows and Linux worlds, where freeware abounded—on Linux especially. There’s certainly a non-insignificant Mac freeware community. I don’t want to ignore that, and I have a few really top shelf freeware applications that I use daily. [1] However, especially since the App Store (iOS and Mac) launched, I’ve begun spending money on applications, and I’m glad.

The app store model has problems that I won’t reiterate here, but it has the incredible benefit of taking the friction out of purchasing software. This works two ways: by putting software a click or two away, and by exerting some downward pressure on application prices. [2] According to Dan Frommer the average price of the top 50 paid apps on the Mac App Store was $26.13 in December of 2011, so it can’t be that much pressure, at least for desktop applications.

Still, though it’s easier, high-priced apps still make me flinch, but less so. I can’t help but think of 1Password, which set me back $50 for the desktop app, $10 for the iPhone app, $15 for the iPad app, and $8 to upgrade to the new 1Password 4 iOS app. That’s over $80 that I’ve paid out, and Agile Bits has seen about $55 of that. [3] I’ve spend about the same on Things, my task management app, on three platforms. I’ve spent almost as much on OmniFocus. When I mention these applications to friends and family members, however, they freeze up or dismiss them out of hand.

Yes, these apps cost a lot of money. Yes, there are cheaper, or even free alternatives to them. However, the value I’ve gotten out of these applications has not only exceeded the original investment, but has me willing to pay for some of them again on other platforms—thus increasing their value to me. Then, consider the warm fuzzies value of supporting an independent developer or company that’s thrown a lot of time, effort, and skill into creating something, and suddenly dropping $50-plus on the right application feel great.

The price you pay for a good piece of software is a lot up front, but the mark of good software is that you get not just as much as you spent in value, but moreso. The security from something like 1Password is a bargain at any price. $50 plus $18 for the iOS app is nothing if you want a really good application to manage your passwords. $70 or $80 for task management is worth it when those tasks follow you around, when it’s frictionless to add them to your system, and pleasurable to use. Much free software [4] falls short in these departments.

And it almost goes without saying that if you’re pirating these applications without paying, the chances of that developer continuing to give us great work drop. Paying for it is the best way to ensure getting good software for years to come.

My MacBook isn’t dead yet, but it’s on life support. Madame Psychosis, my long running, long suffering, White MacBook nothing will be put out to pasture this weekend. Its successor, an as yet unnamed June 2012 model Refurbished 15" MacBook Pro, gets picked up from the Apple Store in Grand Central on Friday. I’ll probably spend Saturday getting it fully set up to records its inaugural episode of Crush On Radio that Sunday. Meanwhile, this old thing will be shipped to Gazelle for whatever sinister purposes they have in mind. A computer that’s given me five and a half years of service has been sent up-river for the princely sum of $113.

That’ll cover a 16GB RAM upgrade.

This machine’s seen me through thick and thin. I got it when I graduated college. I’ve upgraded the RAM to 4GB, which seemed huge at the time. I covered the lid with band stickers—something I regret now. Every iOS device I’ve owned has connected with my MacBook. It sent out dozens résumés during my lost year. I’ve rebuilt, and re-rebuilt Sanspoint on it several times. Crush On Radio began on this thing, with 31 episodes recorded on it, most of which were edited on here as well.

In fact, starting Crush On Radio is when it began to show its age. Waiting an hour while Audacity munches and crunches on a ninety minute audio file to normalize, mix down, compress, and export as MP3 is proof. Plus, the backlight’s been going for some time now… I’ve had to make cutbacks to keep performance up: no running non-essential apps. Disable Dashboard. Disable Flash. Disable Java. [1] I’ve been using my iPad for anything that might be strenuous on my laptop, like streaming video. The time has come. This machine ha the weight of five and a half years of use and abuse, a small amount of road travel, and three major moves.

The new MacBook Pro will be a chance to start my computing environment over again, from scratch. I’m only going to install things when I need them, as I need them. I have 154 items in my Applications folder, many of which I’ve only ever used once or twice—if at all. This, of course, says nothing about the half a decade worth of apps I’ve installed, or the cruft that came over when I imported all the data off my iBook G4 and Mac mini back in the day. It’s taking up space. Even if my new MacBook Pro has a larger hard drive, and it does [2], if I can make it run lighter, all the better.

Still, it’s been a good run. I’ll be sad to see this old thing go. It’s for the best. Time marches on, and sometimes you finally have to make the upgrade. Good Night, Madame Psychosis, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Every so often, when I leave work, I stop by a chain pharmacy [1] on the way to the subway. There, I often purchase a beverage and, if I feel it, a starchy snack food. When I check out, the cashier hands me a comically large receipt, then asks me to take a customer service survey and give them a “nine.” Typically the receipt, and the information on how to take the survey never makes it past the trash can by the door. I’m certain I’m not the only one. The way the staff robotically repeats the exhortation to take the survey, circle the little spot on the receipt with the survey information, and insistence we give them a “nine” tells me that it’s a matter of job security. They used to promote the survey with the chance of a large cash prize, but that stopped, fast.

This seems self-defeating. The sort of person who is going to fill out a survey on customer service at a chain pharmacy is not the kind of person who is going to give a high rating by default. I view it in much the same way I viewed customer interactions when I was behind the counter: you remember the bad experiences more than the good ones—in other words, the negativity bias. I know I’ve had great customer service experiences, but I remember the bad ones more. [2] When we have a bad experience, we want people to know. When we have a really good experience, we want people to know, too. Where, then, does this leave the poor cashiers at the pharmacy?

When the bulk of the interaction is as workaday as buying a soda and a bag of pretzels, the “best” interaction I want is one that is as minimal as possible. Scan the items, tell me the price, take my money, return exact change, bag it, thank me, and let me go. Asking me to take a survey, even on my own time, is negatively influencing the transaction. This being a pharmacy, where people may have larger-scale interactions with a pharmacist, or need to find something they need for a medical problem, this would be more useful. However, the methodology is still flawed, in that you’re asking someone to take a survey and remember the experience they had, and the experiences that will stick with us are typically negative.

It’s the sort of thinking that is prevalent in large, bureaucratic organizations. [3] What’s the easiest way to get a tap into how things are going on a store-by-store level? Ask the customers! How do we ask the customers? Well, since stationing someone at the door to ask folks leaving if they want to take a survey is unlikely to work, so let’s just slap something on a receipt, and make our cashiers spew out a rehearsed line to customers. It’s cheap, it’s efficient, and means we don’t have to do any real work at the corporate office. Extra-long lunch breaks, all around.

A survey request on a receipt is the least effort you can put into getting feedback. Unless they’re spending the money on data analysis to smooth out the distribution of extremely negative answers, and the occasional extremely positive answers, what you will get is basically the fine beige mush of the few people who gave honest, middling answers, and where do you go from that? Nowhere, really. At least in fast food, you can focus on speed and quantify how long it takes for a customer to get food. Retail isn’t as easily simplified and quantified.

Generally, I have the same set of complaints about any retail establishment I go into.

1. I can’t find what I’m looking for easily.
2. I can’t check out fast enough.

The first is intentional on the part of every store. Stores, grocery stores especially, are designed to keep you moving through the store, and make a few impulse buys. The second part is the tricky one. It’s a combination of factors related to staffing, training, number of customers, number of items per customer, method of payment, how well the customer speaks the language, how well the cashier speaks the language… The easiest way to get around that is to throw people at the problem, but then you risk paying cashiers to stand around when the store isn’t busy. And please, don’t get me started on self-checkout machines. They don’t help at all. [4]

To reach the point that I’ve been laboriously trying to set up, retail surveys suck. Surveys that require the customer to put time and space between the transaction and the survey suck even more. They’re a waste of receipt paper, a waste of time at the cash register for the customer and the cashier, and don’t tell you anything you can’t already find out by walking into a store at a busy time of day and trying to buy a bottle of soda and a bag of pretzels.

Like many tech-savvy folks, I quit Instagram over the terms of service fiasco. It was the last straw after recent updates had left the app unstable, often crashing after merely taking a photo— the main feature of the thing. After Instagram sold out out by Facebook, I mused on the price of free apps, but opted to keep with the service, with a wait and see attitude. Thankfully, Flickr was there to catch the fall, having been Frankensteined back to life with a new, non-sucky iPhone app. I quickly paid for a year of Flickr Pro to cement our rekindled relationship.

I’m a bit behind, but I recently read Ryan Block’s reasons for quitting Instagram, and it reminded me of the Faustian pact we make, when we sign up for any free service. The diabolical favors we get from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or any of an (un)holy host of services is that we get to connect with people, often people we want to connect with, for the price of giving up our soul privacy. Some of us have a harder time turning this deal down than others.

Ryan Block’s willingness to just up and shut down his Facebook and Instagram accounts with little regret has me envious, and his story of old, zombified social networks harassing him from beyond the grave is familiar. But, Ryan’s not the only one turning things off. Thomas Brand dropped a lot of social networks, recently, and a bunch of other services as well, opting to stick, exclusively, with App.Net. [1] Patrick Rhone isn’t leading the charge, but predicts 2013 will be the “year of opt-out.” I sort of hope he’s right, but as it stands now, I can’t opt-out of a lot of this crap.

All my friends, and all the technology-savvy members of my family are on Facebook. My job requires a LinkedIn profile. I paid for an account on App.Net, but most everyone I want to communicate with or hear from is on Twitter. When all of your friends and co-workers are completely up-and-up, tech-savvy people with the sort of money to blow on paid social networks, it’s easy to uproot yourself, draw the line in the sand, and say “I’m going to live here now” without worrying about all the people you left behind. Chances are, most of them are where you are too.

It’s probably no coincidence that in an industry as fairly monocultural as technology journalism (From The Magazine, subscription required) that the services tech journalists use are generally monocultural in makeup. Please don’t assuming I’m making the same case as those who say App.Net is a symptom of “white flight”. The case I’m making is that when your circles consist more of technology oriented people, you can afford to be a bit more cavalier about how you associate with them.

Back here, on terra firma, we have to go to where the action is. When the people you care about exist only in those places that you have to give up a part of yourself to join, the choices are either to give up that pound of flesh, or snub them. I don’t say this lightly. I already quit Facebook once, and they dragged me back, kicking and screaming, for more. Right now, I’m getting far more out of Twitter and Facebook than it feels like they’re getting out of me. App.Net is still waiting to be worth the $36 I paid for it.

The party won’t come to me. I don’t have that kind of sway over the people I care about. Instead, I have to go to the party. I’ve made the deal with the devil, and I’m okay with that, but it’s the devil I know. It’s also the devil all my friends know. That makes a lot of difference. For me, price of disconnection is worse than the price of connection.

And yes, that is how they get you.