Sticky Notes Finally Good for Something

I’ve always hated sticky notes. Scratch that. I think the real issue is that I dislike it when people use a lot of sticky notes. A sure sign of a disorganized person. Sticking out of magazines, plastered all over the monitor like some Victorian collar for LCD’s, and found on furniture. Ugh.

However, I have found one decent use for a sticky note. Finally. When you develop software, you are constantly wondering what version of a language or architecture you have installed in your machine. Do I have MySQL 5.0.37 or 5.0.36? I can never remember because like many web developers, something changes every month on my machine.

So, I took a sticky note and just wrote down all the different versions a few months ago. As they change, I just cross them off and rewrite the new version next to it. I just threw out the old sticky note and rewrote it to make it more readable.

Shouldn’t I do this in Notepad and save it to my desktop? Well, maybe. Except that a lot of the time, I’m reading a book in my bed called something like “Your guide to the fantastic world of XML-FO, with a little Photoshop CS2 thrown in for fun” - and the computer is off. I can just stick my head up and peer over to the machine and see if I need to read the section entitled, “If you are running Apache 2.2+” or not.

So my one little sticky note, stuck to my blue-glowing Antic case says only this:

MySQL: 5.0.37
Rails: 1.2.3
Ruby: 1.8.6
Gem: 0.9.4
PHP: 5.2.2
Apache: 2.2.4
TortoiseSVN: 1.4.3
Java Runtime: 1.4.1.07
cURL: 7.16.2
Mongrel: 1.0.1

I don’t have all my software versions on it (like CS3, or Firefox 2 point whatever), but it suffices. So, tell me. Have I started down the slippery slope to organizational anarchy? Is there a better way?

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