I'm glad he mentioned that he never uses minimize button (the yellow minus in the left-hand corner), because it seems even people who have used OS X for years don't get this. Hide (CMD-H) is what you should be using when you want to minimize. Hide others (CMD-ALT-H) is also very useful.
The only time minimize is useful is if you are using a particular application with multiple windows open and you aren't going to be working in one of those windows but don't want to close it because you might come back to it later. In addition to getting it off your screen, this is also helpful so that when you are hitting CTRL-` to switch between the app's windows the window you aren't working in doesn't come up. But if you want to get the whole application out of the way, just use hide.
I found the stuff about photos interesting. I'm a fairly heavy photographer and use a mac. I don't throw away anything other than pure white or pure black photos. I keep 3 copies of all my pictures, organized like he suggests - in directories by YY/MM. I rsync from the main disk to the second disk as soon as I put new photos on the first disk. I rsync from the second disk to the third disk when I think of it. I have 3 1 TB drives (the last one I bought cost C$ 120) and about 600 megs of photos. I only save the raw images, not processed images.
I like my system better than his, at least for photography. I should make more of an effort to backup other stuff (for which I do ad-hoc backups, usually with tar files).
I use an 80gb harddrive with 2 partitions (one for linux and a small 15gb windows partition), so I'm more than just ruthless. I have to be resourceful. I have to be no-food-to-eat resourceful. Dumpster diving resourceful, lol.
I do use iTerm. Terminal does not let me change the ASCII colors, which is a deal breaker for me. (Mostly because of Terminal's default for green - it's too light, and that's the color I use for comments in code.)
This was worth reading just for the open command. Oh, how I have longed for exactly that! But I was woefully ignorant. Thank you, Tim, for showing me the way.
The only time minimize is useful is if you are using a particular application with multiple windows open and you aren't going to be working in one of those windows but don't want to close it because you might come back to it later. In addition to getting it off your screen, this is also helpful so that when you are hitting CTRL-` to switch between the app's windows the window you aren't working in doesn't come up. But if you want to get the whole application out of the way, just use hide.