How many times do you load sites like Slashdot, Netscape, Digg, and others during the day? Do you find all of the links colored a:visited? Do you wish they'd age-out quicker so you'd have more sites to visit and discuss, and to forward to peers and friends?
How many blogs do you read? How many RSS feeds do you subscribe to?
How much time do you spend browsing through Wikipedia entries?
How many futile online debates do you participate in (Microsoft versus Linux. Liberal versus Conservative. Pro- versus Anti-. Debates where nothing will ever be resolved, and no positions will ever be changed. No, seriously, no matter how convincing you think you are, and how enlightened the forum is, it is extraordinarily unlikely that you're ever going to change a single mind, much less the world).
How many facile blog entries are you wasting your time authoring, tickling the reader's ego by telling them that they surely must be among the cream of the crop reading such an enlightened entry (which should offend readers who can detect the obvious pandering, yet it's a tactic that is becoming common), desperately hoping that you'll get atop some momentary meme list, your 5-minutes of fame yielding nothing of real Earthly consequence?
How much time are you spending on all of the above in an average day?
Take a moment and answer honestly. Feel free to answer in the comments if you'd like, though this isn't meant to be a competition.
For many people the answer might be "very little or none at all" , but for quite a few I suspect the answer will lie somewhere between "a hella' lot" and "all day".
What are you gaining from that sunk time? Entertainment? Intellectual stimulation? An enlightened perspective? Work-related information (that's was my personal justification back when Slashdot was much more technology focused, and the discussions actually did expose me to new information about the industry and technologies, though at the time the turnover of stories was so low that a single short visit a day was sufficient)? Are you gathering some nebulous site-specific karma that's more of a badge of excessive free time, or on some sites a perspective that most correlates with the group think, than wizardly knowledge?
Most of the time the net benefit of a day spent on the meme sites is nothing more than entertainment, but few would admit to themselves that it was akin to watching an all-day episode of Survivor or Heroes.
What could you have achieved in that time?
Could you have spent that 3 hours building a Reddit clone (to waste someone else's time)? Launching your eTailoring venture? Learning Japanese? Learning Python? Taking up a new language? Implemented that awesome new piece of functionality? Gone to the gym and started the journey to fitness? Cooked an amazing, exotic meal?
Talking to and observing peers in the industry, I've noticed that this time suckage has become a widespread, massive squandering of opportunities, with so many talented developers, designers, and intellects basically wasting their days away. From a personal perspective, I know that occasionally I find myself "quickly" checking to see if there is anything on the feed sites before delving into a difficult problem, and some time later realizing that I'd completely burned away all of the personal project time that I had set aside.
It's for this reason that I'd previously talked about router blocks and Firefox rationing.
Honestly monitor where your time is going, and if you're being the best you that you can be.
Aside: Many will wonder if the "facile blog entries" bit was self-referential. These blog entries once served a commercial purpose -- yes, they were entirely selfish, as most human efforts are -- but as the associated ventures turned out to not need the publicity, and I no longer was looking for cold consulting clients, that overt selfish motivation evaporated. I've never really been motivated by appearing on the meme sites, as a quick look at the "peers" in the space tells me that it isn't really a great accomplishment to be on the front page alongside a "PICUTRE OF KITTEN [AMAZING!]". Now I mostly do this as a brain exercise, keeping entries very short, infrequent, and quick to compose, saving my time for my attempts to Try To Take Over The World!
Browsing through the meme-linked sites a few days ago, I came across this article on Vanity Fair. In that entertaining read, the author details his many failed attempts, and then ultimate success, trying to track down the location of the Windows XP "Autumn" background picture. Remarkably the photographer didn't even realize that he was the source of a photo seen by hundreds of millions.
The Vanity Fair author was mesmerized by the tranquility and beauty of the picture, and became convinced that he had to find the location, and possibly even visit it. When we see only a small part of a scene, we fill in the surroundings, and he envisioned an idyllic countryside.
Eventually he gets a strange email from a Microsoft source that, while factually a bit incorrect, remarkably leads him to a historian in Burlington with an amazing memory of the area.
The article was a bit surprizing to me as this is my stomping grounds: I live in Northern Burlington -- a part of the Greater Toronto Area -- and every spring, summer and fall, many weekends see us taking drives through the various roads in North Burlington. It isn't really good for the environment and the conservation of oil, but it's remarkably effective getting young children to sleep.
The particular road where the picture was taken is one that we've been down countless times (the summer past we happened upon a Ferrari get-together very close to this location, with several dozen very high-end Ferraris sharing the road with us).
I've taken many fall pictures in the area, as the colours are often spectacular.
Anyways, we were off to go tobogganing today, so I just had to drive past the source of a previously-anonymous picture that so many had seen. As "proof", I took the picture above, trying to emulate the zoom and orientation of the XP picture. The old fence is gone, as is the large tree on the left, but otherwise it's the same.
And to satiate the author's quest for information, let me say that Northern Burlington/Halton is stunningly gorgeous. With multi-million dollar homes intermixed with smaller existing housing (which will eventually get replaced by mansions I'm sure), bordered by the Bruce Trail and the Niagara Escarpment, it's an area of low-intensity, almost-hobbyist type farming , often with nature completely untouched. There are large areas of incredibly dense hardwood trees.
Some areas just a bit further out make you feel like you're in the centre of Northern Ontario, with homes shrouded in vegetation, the tree canopy making it fairly dark on the brightest summer day. All just a short commute from downtown Toronto.
..to anthropomorphize toys.
The scene of the room full of viciously abused toys, all quietly sobbing while reminiscing the days when their owners cared about them and treated them well, is far too common in Christmas movies.
Do kids need this guilt? Do they really need to ascribe higher meaning to what are, in actuality, pieces of fabric, apple cores and recycled Chinese newspapers?
It's just a throwaway toy! Use it and abuse it, and toss it in the garbage with extreme prejudice!
Geez.
I convince my children to care for their toys by factually, and truthfully, informing them that a broken toy = a garbaged toy = one less toy to play with (not that such exhortations achieve much with a preschooler and a toddler, but at least they're a captive audience). I don't try to sucker them into thinking the toy feels pain, or cries at their misuse.
Every gym I've ever gone to has featured a never-ending battle between those who shirk their post-set machine cleaning duties, and those who detest the sweaty stink left after the prior user slinks away without dutifully using the sterilizing spray and paper towels to appropriately sanitize the area.
Short of video evidence and instant membership bans, this battle will never be won. There will always be people taking a quick look around and then shuffling over to defile another machine.
Given that it's as probable as not that any random machine has the leftover pore secretions of the prior user, and it's unlikely to change, why not just accept defeat? Decree it the standard that all users should clean the machine before they use it. Levy no post-use demands.
Not only does this allow for the reality that many people have little concern for the next guy, the cleaning job will likely be vastly superior if people are cleaning for their own use. Those who really don't care can enjoy their collection of skin growths, and those who are really paranoid can appropriately equip themselves with high-proof anti-microbial, and some good defensive clothing/towels.
To: My Pet, My Protege; My Pal; My Chum; My Irritant; My
Nemesis; My Irrelevant;
CC: My Boss; My Boss' Peer; My Future Boss; My Team; Some Else's
Team; Annoyances and Barnacles;
(An author who adds recipients one by one from the contact list generally yields a reversed ordering, with their precious on the right, and their hobbit on the left)
The director of IT just sent out the new Synergizing, Leveraging, And Monetizing strategy paper. As a principal resource in the new initiative, you find yourself a bit unnerved that they included you last in the list of To: recipients.
The outrage!
Their pet employees and sycophants lead the list, followed by the corporate zombies jerkily stumbling towards the inevitable in the next restructuring.
Your email address is bringing up the rear.
The CC: line has the same ordering, though in that case it's the parties not directly involved in the matter discussed.
Was it purely an oversight, or was it an intentional declaration about your standing?
"Don't read too much into it!" most people will answer. "Don't be paranoid!"
And those people would often be right: Many times people reuse old To: lists, or they're technical fumblers barely managing to pull addresses from the contact lists, adding them as they come across them in the sorted list and then reevaluating the line to figure out who's missing. They might be intentionally randomizing recipient lists (which is a tactic I generally use to avoid recipient lists conveying more than I explicitly intend). Maybe they intentionally alphabetize.
That isn't always the case, though, and there are often very real, albeit subtle and generally passive-aggressive, communications when people are given the opportunity to "order" or prioritize other people, particularly their coworkers.
Even when it's subconscious, there is still meaning in the order with which participants came to mind. Maybe they're consciously trying to avoid sending a certain message, for instance placing their office romance last on the recipient list.
It's similar to the choice of seating for a wedding -- hardly an accidental venture, no matter how much your blushing-bride cousin tries to convince you that you're in the nose-bleed section by purely random chance.
Today is the beginning of the loose-leaf collections in my neighborhood. It's a time when squadrons of vacuum trucks go grumbling down the streets, tentacle-like leaf sucking attachment probing about, clearing the curbs and roadside of tree litter.
It's a wonderful service by a fabulous city.
To leverage this service, everyone rakes their lawn, pushing piles of leaves up to the curb to get sucked away, carried off to some unseen composting facility.
I went out to rake -- of course at the last possible moment -- to discover that my neighbor, who I share an open grass border with, had just raked. But instead of raking to the clear but unmarked border between the houses, they pulled back and left an extra foot or so, apparently leaving it for me to rake.
Perhaps they're conceding an extra foot of the land to me? In this way I'm a victorious land conqueror!
Perhaps instead they're being jerks, intentionally leaving some extra work for me, maybe as some sort of jab for an unknown slight.
Maybe the lazy son did it and quite simply tried to trim off a little bit of work.
There is information to be read, although it shrouded in a lot of misinformation and misreading, as is often the case.
I would end with "keep an eye out for these non-direct communications, primarily ensuring that you aren't unintentionally projecting them because people are paying attention", yet most people are already very perceptive to these sorts of subtle hints: Human communication is vastly more involved and complex than simply the words that are spoken or written. Instead this is simply a bit of a thought piece as I ponder the many messages that we convey and receive every day.
Most of my less formal socks are in a big upright clothes hamper - 100s and 100s of socks of just a few designs.
I root through it and find a pair when the need arises. It just seems easier than trying to pair them up out of the laundry.
An internal debate that occurs frequently during these sock diving sessions is when I can't quickly find two of a kind, so I consider just wearing two slightly mismatched socks (e.g. where the ribbing on the sock are slightly different sizes).
"But what if I'm invited to an unexpected Japanese tea ceremony?" I think, motivating myself to continue the search.
You think I'm joking, yet this is exactly the internal dialog that I had this morning.
When I was a young buck in jr. high, I was recommended for, and eagerly agreed to, Junior Achievement. It's basically a geek club for prospective future pointy-haired bosses: You do an "IPO", selling shares to friends and family, and then plan and make (or acquire) some craft or spice rack, foisting it on family and relatives. Then you celebrate your profits. Or, if I recall correctly, you distributed the profits to the shareholders (who were generally the same people you sold the product to).
I don't believe any of this was overseen by the OSC (Ontario Securities Commission. Much like the SEC, but most of the power here lies at the provincial level).
Normally you do this program once, leaving room for future leadership-hopefuls to learn from it. There was a long list of kids hoping to get in, so it's not like they needed chair fillers.
Our first order of business was voting our "leadership committee". I decided that I'd go for one of the positions -- we're there to learn management and business administration, I thought, so it seemed the right thing to do -- so I went for procurement manager or something similar. Remember that you operate under the guidance and direction of local business leaders.
That's when us green recruits discovered that a group of individuals had returned to the program up to 4 times in a row, and were very chummy with the bona fide adults who led our group. For every position there was someone who'd done the same position multiple times, going up against the green recruits.
Despite the fact that I got significant popular support (my petition to the crowd was that I should be voted in because I was new to it, a message that really appealed to the audience. It's hard to be a tyrant in a real democracy, and this group seemed to be clamoring for noob representation), after taking the write-in votes outside and tabulating them, the two adults leading the program returned, ballots having been discarded, to proclaim that the existing incumbents were once again reelected.
What was left for the rest of us? Well, we got to do the manual labour, and we got to try to sell this stuff to people we knew.
We got to bask in the glory of our leadership team.
Nah.
I never went back. If they were using my ball, I would have taken it and gone home.
I've always pondered whether I was a sore loser, or whether this particular program was misrepresented. I lean towards the latter.
