Dreamer ant

Many of us like to get our news stream delivered to us every minute of every hour of every day: RSS feeds, Twitter or Buzz messages, Facebook statuses, emails from mailing lists, etc. That’s just the way we like to stay up to date with the world around us.

The amount of information we get each day from such sources grows little by little as more “content” gets produced, more bloggers appear, more friends get an account on Twitter, etc. More information is better: “let’s subscribe to this as well, just in case”.

Personally I’m starting to feel that staying “up to date with the world” really takes more time than I’d like, and that it’s getting less and less different from some kind of drug addiction, except too much information won’t directly hurt my physical health (note the use of the word “physical”). More information and less knowledge: at the end of the day, after getting my daily fix of RSS content, most of the time I’m not any smarter. Quite the contrary.

What if I stopped taking the time to read/like/comment on all those Facebook statuses from my friends and, instead, took the time to have more real discussions over a dinner, or a drink, with all these friends that I’m following more and more, but actually seeing less than I used to?

What if you didn’t really need to know that your one-time classmate had a bad hangover this morning, that version 2.37.9 of some software you were once interested in just came out, or that some new picture of a super-cute yawning cat just got into your daily news stream’s tubes?

You know what, there’s no way you’ll ever be able to catch up with every single meaningful thing that happens every day; that’s just too much information. What if, instead of spending all this time reading “important” updates, you considered reading more books, doing more “offline” creation yourself, hanging out with real people, spending more time with you family, reading only genuinely insightful articles and blogs (in which case, stop reading this very blog at once)?

I’m starting an information cure right now. Unsubscribe from RSS feeds that deliver information that I wouldn’t *really* be sorry to miss. Stop checking on Facebook statuses and go read a book, play or compose some music. Un-”follow” people I don’t *really* care about, and instead drop them an email about having dinner over the next few weeks. 10 minutes per day reading this particular feed, that’s 60 hours per year. Is this content valuable enough to me that I’d rather not do anything else in those 60 hours?

I feel like the web allowed us to boost our ears’ range from a few meters to thousands of kilometers, and we spend hours per day listening to everything in that range, just because we can and our instinct tells us we really shouldn’t miss any word of it, just in case. Artificially limiting that listening power may look like burying one’s head into the sand and becoming close-minded; I believe however that the re-gained time can be used to stay sane, creative and human.

Honestly, why would I not want to “decrease the risk of failures”?

I hadn’t had a chance to try Amazon’s DRM-free MP3 service since they opened it to French IPs so I bought an album yesterday.

All smooth, except that if for any reason the download of one or several file fails (bad connection at some point), you can’t download it again, it just says failed, please contact customer service (which I had to do, but to their credit they were very speedy). You also can’t download the same files again in the future if you happen to have lost them. Why not, Amazon? If I wanted to illegally copy them to other people I could do it without re-downloading them, and without loss of quality, you know that, right? That’s part of this whole d-i-g-i-t-a-l thing. And what are those .amz-blah.tmp files I’m getting as well? Can’t people just refrain from putting their random crap everywhere (and they’re obviously not used for keeping track of unsuccessful downloads)?

Welcome to trust land.

I find this filming style great for a few scenes, to create contrast, (Saving the Private Ryan?), but when it’s the whole film, it just makes me wanna puke.

I’ve been feeling that way for a long time already, but I just want to say it out loud: I love my job!

It’s challenging, interesting, I work with extremely smart and nice people, the environment is productive while extremely relaxed, the Google offices all around the world and the working conditions definitely live up to all the good rumors about them, and I’m given the freedom to work on what I’m interested in.

A couple of days ago I was showing an engineering director how to compile and find his way through some code to help him start contributing in his spare time. I don’t know many companies where this would happen so naturally.

I thought that after 2.5 years of working in this company I’d have found at least a few things I disliked, but I didn’t. I’m sorry, this is gonna sound like some public relation person told me to say this, but I didn’t find any (maybe apart from the legendary Google fifteen). I just love my job.

Looks like some people are working on actually implementing what I half-jokingly called the Hadopi Router (aka Butterfly router in English) to protests about a French law.

This is starting to get interesting. I must say I was more hoping for a changing law rather than for an actual device, but I’m curious about what they’ll make of it. I did receive plenty of responses from that website from people asking if it would become available at some point…

Why do so many people use the word “nazi” metaphorically? This word has a very specific meaning in a very specific historical context. I think it’s dangerous to use it beyond its proper meaning.

There will be a time when all the victims and close parents of victims of the holocaust will have died out, and when the word “nazi” doesn’t really mean anything any more. When that time comes, everything will be ready for the world to see real nazis appear again, in whatever form will be most likely at that time.

This word is one of the few things that are left to remember what was probably the greatest tragedy of History (I think I am objective in saying that, my education, family and background being completely a-religious), I would love to see it stay intact.

I’m struck by the fact that, very often, the features that are advertised as a product’s killer assets are just lies hiding the fact that the product is crap.

• Why do I have the feeling that all these products I’ve seen in developing countries with well-known brands on them and a large “Genuine” printed somewhere are counterfeits? It doesn’t sound to me like the real brand would print “Genuine” on their products
• In the old days where operating systems were advertised as having “tons of software” for it, you could be sure that that particular operating system did not have the piece of software you needed.
• A company in France that is well known for its ads showing off their great customer service has the worst customer service ever.
• A large part of today’s adults in China show a severe lack of education and knowledge precisely because of the “Cultural Revolution”.

An equal amount of skepticism takes over me when I see today’s oh-so-hype “green” concepts and products.

I think we should all do a better job at taking how things are “sold” to us with shiny names with a grain of salt.