+1 for scratchpad. I use a cheap spiral notebook. It gives me a place (other than the proverbial "back of the envelope" that I used to use) to write quick calculations, half-assed uml diagrams to think through the organizational structure, etc. I keep it as a journal, date and number each page, log the time of entries. I even put a table of contents on them! Almost never refer to them; hell, they're nearly incomprehensible a couple of months after the fact.
Interesting. I do a "status -u" instead, because "update" without knowing what's about to be updated scares me (but I've only been using svn consistently for a few months).
One of the things I do is run who, uptime, and free when I first log in to our development server. I'll repeat that periodically through the day. I ps aux if uptime shows any significant activity.
