dria.org

Interesting article from BusinessWeek about the “return” (not sure where it went) of Flash and the growing popularity of Web games: Flash is Back.

I love the Internet. It is a fundamental part of my daily life — my work, my hobbies, my interests, my news, my entertainment, and my communication streams all involve computers, the Internet, and/or the Web in some way. Recently there has been an explosion in the number of applications I use to get information and to communicate with people online: email (Google, Zimbra), IRC, IM (jabber, AIM, ichat), Twitter, web feeds (back up to over 350 now), a host of forums, an even larger host of websites (both social and non), and so forth.

Unfortunately, the result is that my attention is utterly fractured. If it’s not a conversation in one of my dozen IRC channels it’s an IM message; if not an IM message then it’s a Twitter update, or an email, or my feed reader has new items, or I’m flipping through my dozens of browser tabs, or my calendar is reminding me of one or another meetings or other appointments. I am becoming overwhelmed by this firehose of information, and it’s destroying my ability to focus, to read and think deeply, and, fundamentally, to get work done.

It needs to stop. At very least, it needs to be reduced to a trickle. Thus, I am going on an information diet. The changes I will be working towards are outlined below. “Working towards” means that while I doubt I will stick strictly to this regimen, it is the disciplined ideal towards which I strive.

1) During the work day I will only be checking personal email twice — once at the beginning of the day, and once at lunch (“lunch” can range from 11am to 2pm Eastern Time). After hours, I’ll check when I happen to think of it.

2) During the non-work day I will only be checking work mail once — sometime between dinner and bed. No guarantees what time that will be or whether I’ll be doing anything more than flagging items of interest to deal with the next work day.

3) Over the weekend I will be checking both personal and work mail only twice per day — once in the morning and once before bed.

4) Scheduled meetings are sacred. If I’m scheduled and expected to attend a meeting, I will. If it’s an optional meeting, I will make the decision whether or not to attend when my iCal reminder pops up. If there’s an optional meeting you think I should definitely attend, let me know. I don’t mind meetings, I just want to keep them to a useful minimum.

5) Twitter, while entertaining, has not yet proven to be useful. It will be getting shut off during work hours from here on out. Bummer because it’s invariably good for a laugh, but it’s just too distracting.

6) I will be reducing my IRC channels to the bare minimum during work days. Outside of work hours, all bets are off. If you need to contact me try instant message first, calling my work extension second, or calling my cell third. If I respond to none of these, please email me at my work address if it’s work-related or my personal address if it’s not-work-related.

7) I’ve organized my web feeds into two major groups: “Work” and “Everything Else”. I am reducing the update frequency from every 15 mins to every 2 hours. I will only be checking the “Everything Else” group outside of work hours. Oh lolcats, I will miss you so.

8) When I’m in a phone meeting I will be minimizing all windows except those directly involved with the meeting (agenda, notes, backchannel). Harsh, but necessary. I sat through two phone meetings today and realized that I didn’t hear a single word because I was too busy yammering away in unrelated IRC channels and scanning my web feeds. This is both rude and a complete waste of time, and I apologize for it.

9) I will be unplugging for at least one work hour per day. This means I will simply go offline. During that time I will either be reading, thinking, or working on proposals/documentation/etc. If it turns out that I’m getting solid work done, I reserve the right to extend my unplugged time indefinitely. Turns out a lot of my job is thinking, reading, and writing. If I appear to be offline and you need to contact me, call my extension or my cell.

10) Kinhin. Ok, not technically kinhin, but a very distant personal approximation thereof. Kinhin is a walking form of Zen meditation. Real Zen practitioners do kinhin between periods of zazen (sitting meditation), and it is a very rigorous, formal practice. For me it just means “walking for an hour every day and trying to get my mojo back”.

Well, hot damn. A few us of were just talking about Second Life this weekend, and here they are open sourcing the client code. This has high coolness potential, and I think I’ll poke around Second Life again for fun when I get a chance. More information about their open sourcing of the code is here. Check it out…they even have a developer documentation wiki.

The new year is quickly approaching, and with it the irrational desire to resolve to be a better person. One of my potential new year’s resolutions (which, for what it’s worth, tend to last roughly through mid-February) is to actually blog more. I continue to be torn about blogging, with my inner privacy nut wrestling constantly and valiantly with my inner exhibitionist, but there’s no real reason to not write more, since there are roughly 3 people who read this thing (excepting “Work” posts which get syndicated and read by untold thousands).

With the intention of blogging more, I’m starting to test some new blogging and other related tools. Right now I’m writing this post in MarsEdit which I’m trying because I’m also trying NetNewsWire again (in my ongoing struggle to find a web feed reader that doesn’t basically annoy me all the time). MarsEdit apparently integrates nicely with NetNewsWire which, in turn, apparently integrates with del.icio.us which I’m also trying again since Jots.com fell off the net for a while then came back with stupid ads and crappier service. Of course I’m having problems getting the del.icio.us auto-blog-post tool to work, but nothing new there. (Aside to del.icio.us: extend and simplify those tools a little, being able to filter autoposted links by tag would be seriously awesome).

Ok, that’s a long enough test post for now. Let’s see how this goes.

Update: Seems to work just fine. Cool.

Democracy is a slick, cross-platform application that acts basically like a combo of Internet video guide and video player. Videobomb is, essentially, a Digg for videos. Democracy is nicely integrated with Videobomb. Very slick.

Much like my recent struggles with photo-sharing systems¹, I find myself currently frustrated (largely by the reliability collapse of Jots.com) with pretty much every social bookmarking service out there. Since the hosted stuff isn’t working out for me, I was thinking that a self-hosted del.icio.us-alike would do the trick. I just have no idea if such a beast currently exists, and my Google-fu is failing me.

Here’s a basic rundown of what I’m looking for: A web-based bookmarking system like del.icio.us only hosted and admin’d by me on my own Linux server. It must also be able to push a day’s-worth of links to my weblog (via xmlrpc, for example). Bookmarklets or a Firefox extension for quickly adding bookmarks would be great but not necessary, and demonstrated integration with Wordpress would be ideal.

Is there anything like this out there?

¹ I’m currently playing with Zenphoto, if you were curious. It’s quite neat.

This shared whiteboard system is pretty awesome. It’s flash-based, but is otherwise pretty much everything I can imagine wanting in an online whiteboard system. I haven’t tried the actual “invite a friend” part yet, so I’m not sure how or how well that works, but overall I’m very impressed by this app. Neato.

I’m looking for the simplest possible way to upload, organize, and share my photos. I’ve tried Gallery2 and it’s OK, but I’m wondering if there’s something better out there. I’ve looked at both Flickr and Smugmug, but their UI and visual design just annoy me enough that I’m not really interested in using them.

General requirements: bulk upload from a Mac (ideally with iPhoto integration), must be Firefox friendly, the less Flash the better, autogeneration of resized photos and customizable thumbnail sizes, no upload limit (either per picture or total), reasonable bandwidth limits are OK, pay-for-service is OK, customizable themes would be ideal, proven reliable service would be nice, solid customer service track record would also be good.

I get the feeling I’m going to just stick with Gallery2.

Google Video. Yep. Now, if you really want to, you can watch a poorly compressed low resolution episode of CSI or Star Trek Voyager or (for whatever f*&^ing reason) The Brady Bunch for a mere $1.99 USD.

Um. Or not. Personally, I’ll save my money and instead of spending $51 ($44 USD) on a season’s worth of crappily-encoded episodes of CSI, I’ll spend $54 for a season on DVD. Some of which are even in high def!

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t watch enough TV to justify spending that kind of money on that kind of quality when I can, 95% of the time, order what I want from Amazon and have it on DVD at my house within a week. I also don’t buy music online, so maybe I’m just being a curmudgeon. Maybe someday when music is $0.10/track and TV episodes are decent quality. Or, you know, 5 years from now when physical media has gone the way of the poor, poor Dodo and I have no choice.

Damned kids. Get off my lawn.

While pecking away at a post on my other, more literary, weblog, I realized that I waste a lot of time. A lot of the time I waste is wasted simply reading the web, the vast majority of which is just not useful to me beyond being random trivia I absorb and occasionally pass along. The vast majority of this vast majority of not-really-useful-content comes to me via web feeds. To quote myself:

One easy way for me to make more time is to stop reading through thousands of stories via RSS. I’m of the opinion that the blogosphere has (as quickly as it started) jumped the shark. Once upon a time, weblogs acted as human filters for the sea of dross that flooded through the intartron. Now blogs seem simply to amplify the noise, not only adding to the flood of garbage (one piece of real content will get reflected back a dozen times, with little or no added or useful commentary) but also drowning out the useful-but-less-noticed content that’s out there. Job one, therefore, is to cut my RSS subscriptions from “anything that’s ever caught my interest for more than 30 seconds” to “feeds for things I actually need to monitor every 2 hours”. This will make a nicely compact, useful, and efficient list.

As an example, I got out of bed at 9am this morning. After making coffee (mm, coffee), I read my email. That was finished by around 9:30am. Since then (it is now 1:43pm) I’ve been reading through my RSS feeds. What the hell is with that? That’s four hours of my life I won’t be getting back ever, and only about 6 of the stories I read required any sort of real attention or action on my part (all of which were related to the MDC).

Enough, say I. Right now I am subscribed to 185 feeds. Having looked through those, I’ve found that only fourteen (14!) are things I actually need to monitor regularly. I’ve put those 14 in their own folder. The rest will be getting moved into a web-based feed reader system (bloglines or such) where I’ll check them once every couple of days.

I honestly have no idea how people who boast they’re subscribed to thousands of feeds ever get anything done.

I think I’ll make 2006 the Year of Figuring Out How to Waste Less Time. Paring down my feeds is step 1.