Category Archives: Thoughts

Thoughts

Keeping up with the news

It’s so easy to spread yourself thin these modern times… You’ve got news up the wazoo, 24×7, from a gazillion sources. On top of that, you’ve got blogs, with experts expounding on the virtues of this and that, and why it should matter to you, and you’ve got feeds of all sorts you can subscribe to, and podcasts you can listen to, and videos you can watch on these humongous video sites like YouTube and Google Video and Revver and plenty more. If that’s not enough, you can watch tens, if not hundreds, of TV channels, and the programming variety just boggles the mind.

Trouble is, most of this is garbage, and you can’t keep up with all of it. As addictive as it is to read a ridiculous amount of news, and be at the top of the game on many subjects, it’s wearisome, stressful and exhausting. It’s not seldom that I found myself bleary-eyed and listless after catching up on the news these past several years. And yet, I still didn’t learn my lesson, and wanted more, more, more. Well, you can’t have it all. It’s humanly impossible to stay plugged into many sources at once, and expect to get anything else done. You end up becoming part of the pipe, unable to contribute, overwhelmed by the information, receptive but useless, a consumer, not a producer.

I suppose if that’s all you want to be, that’s fine, but I’d rather make content, not consume it. I want to leave a mark, not go through life eating, sleeping and watching TV or reading the news. More than that, and I suppose on a more basic level as well, I want to get some work done, not waste my day away. So, for the umpteenth time, I’ve come to the realization that I need to cut down on my news addiction. It’s good to stay informed, but it’s better to stay alert. And it’s even better to get my plans accomplished. Which for me includes work, consulting, photography and blogging on weekdays. On weekends, more consulting, photography and blogging, reviews and sometimes, podcasts. And somewhere in there, I’ve got to squeeze in downtime with my lovely wife and a movie then and now. Not to mention that I’ve got other projects waiting on the back burner.

The thing is, reading the news in itself doesn’t take that much time. At most, it takes one to one and half hours per day. I don’t think that’s a lot of time. But, it IS a lot of information. And information processing wears you down, particularly when it comes from many sources. If you don’t believe me, try picking up a few tens of books, and rapid-read a few pages from each. See how you feel at the end of that little power session! When we read the news, it’s the same thing. We don’t notice it these days because it’s so easy to subscribe to a ridiculous number of various sources in news or feed readers. They aggregate all of that content for us in one place, and we just browse through and read. But it’s all written by different people, on different subjects, in different styles, with differing levels of emotion. Our brain has to adapt to each style of writing and process all of that information in a short amount of time.

Add to that the emotion we spend if we get worked up about an article. I’m guilty of that a lot. If I read someone’s getting abused somewhere, I’ll get mad at that injustice. Some days that anger will affect me for more than half a days, and truth be told, there isn’t a darned thing I can do to help that person or people other than share that article with my friends or on my blog. The amount of help that provides is questionable and depends on the situations. Some are helped by more media attention, and some aren’t. So what’s the good of getting worked up over them? I don’t know. I do know I can’t help it, so the only way for me to stay focused on what I need to do is to avoid those articles. Otherwise, I end up shooting myself in the foot and I can’t meet my goals.

So while it’s not about the time, although it’s nice to gain an extra hour here and there, it’s about the effect of the news on you or me. That’s why I’ve already started to pare down on the amount of news sources I read. I’ve cut a few out today, and will continue to cut them down till I arrive at a good balance between quality of information and time spent reading it. And I encourage you to do the same. Don’t think I hold myself immune from this. If you find that I don’t add value to your day, then unsubscribe. Far be it from me to waste your time and keep you from doing something useful.

Here’s to a productive use of our time here on earth, brief as it is!

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Thoughts

The Simpsons voice actors

James Lipton interviewed the actors that do the voices for The Simpsons, and a kind soul uploaded the video to YouTube.  It’s divided into three parts. Enjoy!

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Thoughts

It's got to be automated

I’ve just helped a friend get her laptop going again (I hope). She called me asking for help because Office couldn’t open some documents properly for her, and on top of that, her computer was acting strangely. It turned out she needed an extra feature from the Office CD installed, so I did it. But, while I did that, I discovered that she had a virus infection. When I connected her laptop to the Internet to update the antivirus definitions, it turned out that Symantec couldn’t update itself — possibly due to the virus. I decided to run a full system scan (she couldn’t remember the last time she did that), and found another virus. I left it running while I backed up some of her important documents to a flash drive and asked her to work on them on another computer. It remains to be seen whether that laptop will recover from the infection or not.

But this only served to underline the glaring problems of basic computer security that everyday users have to face. They may have antivirus software, but they don’t use it, nor do they update it regularly. They may have heard that it’s good to back up your files, but they don’t do it, or when they do it, it’s haphazard. A casual dragging of some files onto a flash drive, the burning of a CD with some important files, etc. They’ve also heard about spyware, but I guarantee you that most don’t have antispyware software installed, nor do they run it regularly. And that’s the rub! You can have even a brand new system, but it can still get infected and you can lose all your data. Or worse, some spyware will run through your files, picking out financial information, and you’ll find yourself with no money in the bank, or with your 401k account depleted. It’s happened, it’s been in the news, none of this should be new to anyone. But what do regular computer users (non-techies) do? They go right on using their computers as if they’re immune from this.

This is why I applaud both Microsoft and Apple for introducing software that backs up files automatically, and also runs regular antivirus and antispyware checks (these last two features only apply to Microsoft’s software). Microsoft introduced OneCare Live late last year, and it does everything regular users need it to do. I actually run it on my own laptop as well. Not only does it do all this automatically, but it’ll nag the user if there’s some action that needs to happen on their part. For example, it nagged me that I wasn’t backing up my files, and it continued to do so until I connected a USB drive to my laptop and set it to back them up to that location automatically. On top of all this, it also runs a defrag and cleans up my laptop of temp files. OneCare’s messages are color-coded, so even the simplest of users can figure out when something’s wrong. When everything’s fine, it’s green. When something needs to happen, it’s yellow. When things are bad, it’s red. It’s hard to miss the point.

When Apple releases the next version of OS X (code-named Leopard), it’ll include automatic backup software that’ll let you go back in time to various versions of files, or recover deleted files. It’s a huge step in the right direction (the interface itself is fantastic) considering that Apple has so far had only .Mac and its Backup software, but you had to pay $99 for .Mac to be able to use Backup. That was a silly arrangement. Apple’s also been lucky so far because there are very few viruses and spyware built for OS X, but that will by no means be the norm as their platform gains more users. I also don’t like the fact that there’s no defrag software built into OS X. Apple actually advises against defragmentation. Well, whether they want to recognize it or not, the contents of the hard drive will get fragmented over time, and it doesn’t matter whether a computer runs Windows, OS X or Linux; it’ll need to be defragmented sooner or later. I’d like to see some defrag utility from Apple, sooner rather than later. I’d rather not have to reformat the computer in order to get my bits organized.

I also appreciate that both Apple and Microsoft have moved to delivering critical system updates automatically. Apple will prompt you to download and install them, while Microsoft gives you the chance to automatically install them or to choose when you want to do it.

Regardless of the computing platform you or John, Jane or Mikey down the block uses, it’s all got to be automated. Each OS has to do all of the tasks that are vital for the well-functioning of that platform, automatically, by default, and to nag the user constantly when there’s an action to be taken. Sure, the nagging may get annoying for techies like me, but it’s vitally important for the normal users that don’t know what’s involved with keeping their system up to date… or else…

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Here's to a few milestones

This weekend, I (or rather my photos) reached an important milestone. I/they crossed over 100,000 views. That’s amazing as far as I’m concerned. In the relatively short span of four months, I got to the point where I’m getting more than 1,000 views per day, and have now reached 100,000 views. It was just back in October that I passed 10,000 views, and here I am today.

I’m really happy with the progress I’m making, and even more than that, I’m happier that my photographic skills are visibly improving. I’ve learned so much in these past four months, and have benefited so much from interacting with fellow photographers, that my success is doubly sweet.

This next “milestone” is somewhat dubious, but it’s worth mentioning. A few days ago, I reached over 30,000 spam comments, right here on my blog. Yeah, it’s disgusting. But, none of them made it to the live site. All of them got caught by Akismet, my WordPress spam prevention plugin. I featured Akismet in this post I wrote at the start of January, and I meant every word I said about it. The only improvement I could make to it is a CAPTCHA. I find that more and more spam comments make it to the Moderation Queue instead of the Spam folder these days. Spammers are either using fresh batches of IP addresses or finding ways to sneak past Akismet’s spam filters. Still, NONE of them make it to the blog.

While I’m on the subject, I’d like to reiterate my very ardent wish that ALL spammers (in particular sploggers, spam commenters and feed scrapers) be flogged publicly. I would gladly volunteer to perform this duty myself. I think they all deserve it for poisoning search engine results, making blogs uglier, decreasing my content’s rank, and littering the Internet. I don’t know how likely this is to happen, but a fellow can dream, can’t he?

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Follow your passion

I find sunrises to be very encouraging. When that sun starts peeking over the horizon and lights everything up in those glorious, golden hues, hope springs anew.

Follow your passion

There’s always more hope

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