My Information Experiment

A few years ago I heard that the most informed people were those who regularly watch the evening news – local and national. This came as a surprise to me, a guy thoroughly overwhelmed by hundreds of minute-by-minute RSS feed updates. I thought that I was surely the most up-to-date fellow around. But, I’ve never been able to get a solid grasp of “real” world news from online sources. Either I get overwhelmed by the amount of information or I get distracted by geek news and pictures.

So, two years after first learning that despite being highly tech savvy I was among the less-informed, I am going to undertake an experiment and get my news from three different sources each of three months.

March: I will read one local and one national newspapers daily for one month. I will do my best to avoid both online and television news.

April: I will watch the local and national news daily, avoiding newspapers and online news.

May: I will read online news (sources TBD), avoiding tv news and newspapers.

My prediction is that if I can make/find the time to read the newspapers, I’ll be most informed during March. Least informed in May.

I’ll post my thoughts at the end of each month and a conclusion in June.

More Time Needed

I wish I had more time for everything because there are so many things that interest me. It’s inevitable that I discover and archive, drive by, dream up, and am assigned much more than I’ll ever be able to take in thoughtfully. And that is just one day. The next day it starts all over again. It’s not a feeling of being overwhelmed as much as it is disappointment that I can’t effectively absorb more.

I wonder if I would feel the same way if I stopped reading so many blogs, twitter posts, and facebook notifications. Consuming all of that “pop-life” is like trying to get my brain to record the lives and events of a thousand different people each day.

It is my hunch that if I were able to better focus on “local-me” that I would find each day more fulfilling and, in turn, less stuffed. And who I am trying to prove something to – that I care about all of the useless gadgetry, latest fashions, and most obscure routines of people I’ll never know? It can’t be anyone except myself.

So many people.
So many stories.
So many facts.
So little time.

Cell Phone Improvement

I want a cell phone company that allows me to access the content on my phone from the internet. For example, I want an online repository of my text message, phone numbers, photos, etc. I like to save some text messages, but it’s a pain in the ass to remember which ones and to copy them to a file on my computer, etc. And if I lose my phone, it would be nice to have an automatic backup copy that I could access.

Basically, the cellphone market should (and probably is) do its best to copy the Web 2.0 trend and the move of vital application online. Considering that you can now email, share photos, IM, maintain a calendar, and create word documents, spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations online, I think I’m not asking too much with phones.

Subway Systems to Scale

This is really cool…subway systems of the world, presented on the same scale.

The San Fransisco subway looks the biggest, but it isn’t very “dense.” London’s on the other hand is large and a lot “denser.” And it looks like Marseille is the smallest system. My favorite is the Beijing subway, which is just a straight line with a square that intersects it. I look forward to traveling on it this summer.

It would be interesting if someone would animate the construction of each system against time and include some socio-economic data regarding whether the subway system drove development of suburban areas or if it responded to it.

WMATA, the subway system that serves Washington D.C. and the surrounding area, is planning to extend the Orange Line further west as far as Dulles International Airport. I used to work beyond the reaches of the Orange Line, and I and my many co-workers who lived in D.C. would have used the metro everyday if it had reached our office in Herndon, VA. As it is now, the metro goes about half-way out. There is huge growth along the route of the proposed Orange Line, and the traffic was always horrendous both to and from work. So it seems the extension would supply vital demand for metro transport.

Here’s another version.

Some subways I’ve traveled on:

* NYC – MTA
* Chicago – CTA
* Paris – RATP
* Wash DC – WMATA
* Los Angeles – MTA