Staying shorebound

I spent much of last weekend changing my unhealthy information gathering habits. That sounds as banal in my head as it looks on this screen. Still, these are the things I do so that I can streamline my work activities and spend less time in information transit, that dull purgatory where mindless effort meets clicking and load times.

Of course, setting up Mail and Vienna in order to let the information waves come to me, instead of climbing into my Firefox boat and paddling out to six different websites, isn't going to make me a better person. In fact, it may only save me a couple of minutes a day of mindless effort. This means that I have to ask if it's worth spending an entire day setting up and processing all of my email and feeds from the past three years, just so that I don't have to click on websites to get to it.

In short, the answer is yes. Some things were simply not meant for primary access through websites, and email and syndication are among them. I may even argue that the best affordances of email and syndication, such as automatic delivery or seamless scrolling through records, are trampled on by accessing them through websites, but I'll save that for another day.

Nocturnal

While looking for new software on Friday, I found a gem called Nocturne. It inverts, de-saturates, and performs minor color corrections to the screen output on OSX. This is why I am looking at a vast field of black like the night on my screen, broken by white sentences like constellations of stars.

I never realized how intense it was to stare into a full color screen with bright backgrounds until I stopped. Now I don't really want to go back. Progress has finally returned to black and white.