“You Have Not Read The Entire Internet”

My chum Adam recently posted this Tweet [*] which nicely encapsulates my RSS scenario (in addition to his, apparently):

At some point, having an unread count on your RSS reader becomes as useful as an app that says “You have not read the entire internet”.

[*] For those who aren’t aware, “tweets” describe messages on Twitter, “a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send ‘updates’” to their friends.

Indeed, while I don’t think of myself as a pack rat (as I actually find it rather fun to throw things away that I no longer need), I’m starting to realize that I may have tendencies toward information pack-ratting. Fortunately, this is typically harmless; for example, with hard disk storage as cheap as it is these days, there’s little disadvantage to keeping old photos those I’ve taken.

On the other hand, it can be overwhelming to have thousands of unread items in one’s RSS reader. And, now that my taxes are out of the way, this may be a good opportunity to get a handle on that. I’ve only been able to find one article addressing this so far (not that there aren’t more, but I just haven’t found them). Kathy Sierra has an informative entry about The myth of “keeping up”. Much of it is written with an eye toward paper-based media (magazines and the like) but most of the advice is just as applicable toward RSS-based subscriptions as well.

Probably the most significant of her suggestions is to “Unsubscribe to as many things as possible”. If I were being glib, I might be tempted to write that off as being “easier said than done” ;). Kidding aside, while that may be difficult, I think that it may also be the most fruitful of her suggestions. Then again, with the number of feeds to which I subscribe, I feel like I almost need a meta suggestion (or even a rule of thumb) about triaging my feeds to figure out which to delete and which to keep. Meta-suggestion or not, I think I feel reinvigorated toward trimming my feeds.

Carlos Mencia Steals Jokes

I’ve never been much a fan of Carlos Mencia’s comedy, but stealing jokes from other comics just isn’t cool. And, of all people, wouldn’t stealing from Cosby only make it all the more obvious?

What I do find amusing, however, is that his real name is Ned Mencia (and, no, that’s not a joke). (Via: Digg)

Photos from SXSW 2007

Aaron Gustafson makes an effort to listen as he plays with Lego bricks

I had a great time at SXSW and I was able to take a bunch more pictures. I’ve finished processing those and I’ve posted those photos on Flickr. For those who may be curious, I took 43 photos, chose to process 20 of those, and posted 8 shots.

For what it’s worth, I made use of raw mode this time (well, RAW + JPEG Fine) and I my shots seemed to have a better resistance to having their highlights getting blown out (a reoccurring problem that I was running into as I was taking shots during my trip to South Africa in February). Then again, the lighting was almost completely different between those shots and these; in South Africa, I was mostly dealing with either bright sunlight or incandescent light, while in Austin I mostly had cloudy days (not that I'm complaining — cloudy days can be very handy for their diffuse light!).

Standard photo-entry text: All my photos are released under a Creative Commons license which roughly states that you’re free to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”. One exception, however, is this shot of the Q & A session after Helvetica — Andrew Dupont was trying my camera to get a feel for it; that’s one of his shots and he mentioned to me ahead of time that he’d like to place that under CC-Attribution license.

First-Person Shooters Improve Eyesight

LiveScience reports on a study which concluded that “action video games that involve firing guns can improve your eyesight”:

A group of 10 male college students who started out as non-gamers and then received 30 hours of training on first-person action video games showed a substantial increase in their ability to see objects accurately in a cluttered space, compared to 10 non-gamers given the same test, said Daphne Bevelier of the University of Rochester.

[…]

First-person action games helped study subjects improve their spatial resolution, meaning their ability to clearly see small, closely packed together objects, such as letters, she said. Game-playing actually changes the way our brains process visual information. […]

I think this may be just the motivation I need to play Doom 3 more often — it’s for my own good, right? ;).

SXSW 2007 Panels I’m Going To

It’s early March and that can only mean that it's time for SXSW, a multi-part film / music / interactive festival. I’m only going for the interactive part, myself, which focuses on design, web coding, and such. Anyhow, if you’ll be down in Austin, here’re some of the panels I’ll be going to:

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday