Category: ephemera

“The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.” — Horace Walpole (This quote is on some tea bag label.)

Evidently, the majority do not share my interpretation of the above quote: that life is suffering and thus all we feel is tragedy; and that, when you think about it, life is a big joke anyway. I still don’t think my friends’ interpretation makes any sense.

Going on vacation for a few days and being without internet access is liberating, but it’s so painful . After getting back from 4 days in Cabo, it took me over 3 hours to go through all the accumulated email, rss feeds, and tweets, and to check my usual websites. Which I think means I spend over an hour a day on “information upkeep.” This isn’t terrible or terribly surprising, but it still seems like life should be a little more streamlined so that being disconnected for a few days doesn’t mean one is inundated with a backlog of things to do. Saving 10-15 minutes a day would be a huge time savings. On the other hand, there’s not really that much to do in life.

Some things that I think would help a little:

• Some sort of priority queue for twitter. I can organize rss feeds into different folders in google reader, which is very useful when I want to skip certain feeds. Having something like this for twitter would be a little useful.
• A better news system. It was nice when I had the time to listen to the New York Times front page and BBC world news podcasts, back when I had to walk to classes (after my bike was stolen). Not having a TV makes my news gathering a bit intermittent. Currently, I subscribe to rss feeds from the NYT, NPR, Economist (rarely read), and Slashdot, but it’s a minor miracle if I ever read past the feed’s attached blurb for the articles. Having to go through roughly 100 posts a day from these sources is also a bit of a chore. I think it would be nice to have a place where I get short summaries of maybe 15-20 news items a day. Of course, finding a balance of local, national, global, and science/tech news with that constraint is probably a bit difficult. Any suggestions would be welcome on how to tackle this problem.

I’ve begun to think that some things should probably not be publicly findable, hence the protected posts. On the other hand, I think anyone whom I know who actually reads this blog wouldn’t be excluded. Shoot me an email or IM if you want to know the password.