Curiouser and Curiouser! on information-overload

Atlas says "Goodbye world, hello Tequila!"

Fri, 12 Jul 2002 11:05:07 +0100

Today I'm accepting something important.

I cannot cope.

I am now subscribed to 37 news sources. I add about one new source a week. Each of these is easily capable of delivering at least one or two items each day that are really interesting to me. That I want to talk about. But I cannot absorb this quanitity of new information even on a good day. There is no time to reflect, to mull, to doze on it.

So I have resolved that I don't care.

I won't cope.

I'll let good stuff go by the wayside.

Other people will find it.

Google will keep track of it.

It's all their when the time comes.

I'm not Atlas to the internet.

Even to my own small chunk of it.

There.

I feel better now.

Six Degree's of Freedom? Well maybe...

Tue, 20 Aug 2002 16:25:22 +0100

Ron Lusk posted recently about a program called Six Degree's which they call "Time-freeing technology." It's a pretty simple idea. An application that links together all the emails, files and people in your outlook database. Example: you click on an email in Outlook and in the Six Degree's window you can see all the related emails, the people involved in those emails and any files exchanged in those emails.

It certainly fits into my category of information tools for personal effectiveness so I was interested to and downloaded it. The tutorial presentation was very slick, but I hit a snag when it came to try and index the contents of my Outlook folders.

"An unexpected exception has been caught in initTroll"

not what you want to see, but better, I suppose, than not catching it. The advice was to restart, but that hasn't solved it.

I'm in two minds about whether to give it another chance. At the back of my mind I am not convinced this is a technology that will be effective due to it's dependence upon file attachments. I am not a believer in using email to handle projects, nor in sending/expecting attached files. There are better technologies out there.

So Six Degree's seems a bit like a band-aid when what we need is a vaccine.

However lot's of people do manage projects via email, and are attachment junkies. This technology could very well work for them and it might be a good transitional technology. A way of organizing a projects assets in order to migrate it to something more sensible.

Maybe I'll give it another go tomorrow.

I know when I'm beaten

Sat, 13 May 2006 11:20:49 +0100

Okay so I got down to less than 10,000 unread threads in the Rails mailing list. I did this by going through page after page of threads in GMail hitting "Select All, Delete" until I got the number under 10,000. My strategy for the next 10,000 is more of the same.

If Rails isn't mainstream now I don't want to see what that mailling list might look like when it is. Perhaps I will continue to miss many diamonds by not being there and I surely already hurt by not participating more but my day job isn't titled developer and I just couldn't afford to keep up. Now I can't afford the cognitive pressure of even thinking about keeping up. It's never going to happen.

Rails list, you have defeated me!