Random Developments

A few months ago I posted a link to photos of a plane hit by hail. Well, now we can see what a plane looks like after being hit by a missile. This site has close-up pictures of the DHL Airbus that was attacked when leaving Baghdad a few weeks ago. All I can say is that, if a plane can be that damaged and still land somewhat safely, I will never, ever worry about anything when flying in an Airbus anymore.

So, how bad is it when you have to file an article on information overload into your “to read when I have time” folder?

When I realized what I had done, I became convinced that I am, indeed, overloaded with information. The aforementioned folder holds, today, 75 bookmarks, ranging on subjects from info on the Boeing 767 family to tourist information on Reykjavik, Iceland, meandering through several technical subjects in between. Do I intend to read each of these articles or websites? Well, at least I intended to, at some point. Will I ever? Probably not.

To that, I can also add the few mailing lists I subscribe to (when I left for my last vacation, I unsubscribed from most of the high-volume lists, and now I find that I don’t miss them at all), and many blogs I check on my aggregator. Again, I can’t possibly read everything that comes my way, and I don’t even seriously try to. Which is kind of frustrating.

And then there’s the daily newspaper, weekly news magazine, and monthly science and technology magazines I buy or subscribe to. And, as you can probably guess, I don’t have time to read from them all that I would like to.

However, one can ask (as I recently did): do I need all this information? Is there something vital that I will miss if I don’t receive data from all these sources? Wouldn’t I rather be doing something more useful, such as learning new things, doing something fun, even sleeping? I think we all know the answer to these questions.

So, what am I doing about this? Firstly, I admitted to myself that reading long texts off a computer screen is not only uncomfortable, it’s also distracting (after all, you’re one Alt-Tab away from material that can be more interesting). So, last week, on advice of my SO, I started printing texts and bringing them home to read them in a more comfortable setting. So far, it’s working. I know that this is not very friendly towards the environment, but it is helping me to make some headway into my reading list, and that is a good thing.

However, it is in fact somewhat ironic that most of the information I receive nowadays comes to me in form of bits, but I have to “convert” it into atoms (paper and ink) to take full advantage of it. Nicholas Negroponte would frown severely on this.

Thus, this is my new year’s resolution: to start being more in control of the information I receive and absorb. That means dumping stuff that does not interest me, and concentrating on what is actually interesting and useful. I’ll keep you posted on how I go about this.

Wish me luck.

I already wrote about the Y2K bug showing up in the wild when most people thought it was already extinct… well, here it is again, in the browser status bar of the Human Resources application for a company that shall remain nameless (the identifying bits were smudged over to protect the guilty).

Perhaps the real Y2K catastrophe is still waiting to happen…

I was going through some old tapes recently, and found three episodes of thirtysomething hidden in one of them. They happened to be the one when Gary tries to get tenure at the university, the one when Michael and Hope go away for the weekend and leave their baby with Nancy, and the one when they discuss having a second baby and Hope finds an old journal in their attic.

They were originally broadcast in 1988 (that is, Michael and Hope’s baby is now probably in high school) and I recorded them in December of 1995. That means that it took me eight years, almost to the day, to watch the episodes I recorded. Talk about procrastinating…

But the fun thing is… when I recorded them, I was a twenty-something (and when they first aired I was a teenager!). I was attracted to that show because the producers, Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, also produced the short-lived (and great) show My So-Called Life, which I greatly enjoyed. I recorded the episodes because they aired very late in the night. But the fact that they sat undisturbed for eight years on that tape can probably tell us that I wasn’t really hooked at that time.

Well, now I am a thirty-something, and I did watch the episodes. And I think I can relate to those people. I’d like to see a show like that nowadays; a show about “real” people in their 30s who are not like the guys in Friends or the girls in Sex and the City; just, you know, regular people.

I guess the chances of that happening are very close to zero, though.

The UN says that too much of the content of the Internet is in English. Now, why would that be, one wonders… would it be because most of the Internet users around the world speak English ?

At least, that’s why this blog is in English (even though I publish another one in Portuguese): most of the reading public out there speaks English.

Jeremy Zawodny wrote about what he was publishing on the net 10 years ago, and about how the wayback machine brings everything back to life, and, so, I just had to look myself up…

You can see the result here; that’s the oldest page they have in the archive that definitely comes from me, and it is for Dec. 20, 1996; almost seven years ago. However, the page itself is dated Apr. 7, 1995. Almost two more years before I can celebrate my 10 years of web presence…

Maybe I should celebrate April 7th as my web birthday…

While looking for a better news aggregator (aren’t we all?), I found Bloglines, which is a server-side reader. I was never too fond of server-side readers for use with browsers, but this one is fast, very easy to use, and enjoyable. Also, I’ve been feeling the need to be able to read feeds from different computers while maintaining the status of what I had already read, and this works just fine for that.

I’m still trying it, but it looks good enough to recommend to other people. I’m just not too sure about where the company will get money from, as there seems to be no source of income to be seen… Let’s just hope that, whatever their plans are, they can keep it working well and free.

Update 23-May-2005: read this before considering using Bloglines.