Nostalgia—OB Presentation

Back in the day we had a course called Organisational Behaviour/Organizational Behavior. (A course that has been life-altering. :))

Going through my Google Docs, I found a document that was the text of my presentation as part of the tutorial for the course. It was about a fifteen-minute speech on "Experiment". The starting idea comes from one of the best books ever: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. I also read quite a few blog posts from around the blogosphere for inspiration; thanks to all those writers.

Let's see if you think it's an interesting read.

view.txtbear.com/81565/ob-presentation

P.S. "ICE Age" is the term our tutorial teacher used for the current times of Information, Communication and Entertainment.

Brain Map Sharing (Random Thoughts 2)

All right; time for another post of that kind. Randomer this time, I guess.

- Jujus café, for now, is just the kind of place that will be my regular hangout. Finally a place that seems to welcome people who are okay with being alone sometimes. ;) For now even the crowd that's there (as I've noticed in my two days in a row) isn't the usual staring kind. How cool is that!

It's just the perfect place for thinking over a cup of coffee, or brainstorming, which was very successful today.

- I couldn't get the official tweet button to work for me. Keeps pointing to the blog rather than the post. And used from within Reader, points to reader.google.com. Not fair. I know, of course, the fault is mine.

- Typing is so much fun! So is Twitter.

- I just suggested "geek dudette" as a sort of title for myself. Makes me laugh somehow. And here's THE link again. It'll tell you I'm not a nerd, but a geek; the dudette part is for you to decide.

- I'm reading The Tipping Point these days. Next up are more bestsellers in the same category. The concept is so brilliant. Might want to study something on these lines later in life.

- Reminds me of the Millennium Trilogy. Three of the best books I've read lately. I hope the English movies are good. They'd better be.

- I want to read Chelsea Handler as well. Probably after I'm done with economics. And I want to read everything by Nora Roberts as well. Birthright was my latest favourite before I read Stieg Larsson/Reg Keeland. Gosh, the world needs more libraries. Not to forget... The Glamour of Grammar.

RSS Zen ;)

Two summers ago, I had started actively following a few tech blogs, through which I learnt about Google Reader. And soon, was in an infinite loop of discovering new blogs and subscribing to them. For months I was on what felt like a learning high, particularly in terms of free software, web apps and some tech news. With time my subscription list began to grow to include personal blogs and blogs about productivity, happiness, simplicity, science, news, apples, oranges and lemons. And obviously, it didn't take time for the process to become counter-productive and give me mini-panic attacks to see upwards of 500 unread items every day.
So, now finally I have almost achieved RSS zen by cutting down the list. Here's what I did:

1. Reduce the number of tech blogs on my list
I had found out about most tech blogs on my list via guest/shared posts on Lifehacker and MakeUseOf and had started following them. Soon, I was mostly just getting the same information from multiple sources. Unproductive. I traced the route back and have now unsubscribed from most tech blogs but these two and a few other favourites.

2. Unsubscribe from blogs that would look good on a list, but weren't getting read
Having realized that some of the blogs on my list weren't actually getting read, I unsubscribed. The names are stuck in my memory well enough to guarantee an occasional visit to the web log itself.

3. Refer to stats for starred items
I use starred items mostly to bookmark posts that I will keep wanting to come back to. Looking at the blogs with the least starred items gave me a good idea of which ones I don't want to follow.

4. Split followed blogs across platforms
Unbelievably for me, I now follow mental_floss only on Twitter. Likewise, TED.com and IBNLive are only on my Facebook pages list. This actually helps, and makes reading more interesting because now I don't have to read all my posts with the same UI.

5. Keep Reader for "forgettable" blogs
I might miss a tweet or Facebook update, but it's hard to just not notice an unread item in Reader, so I've made sure that smaller or low-frequency blogs stay on.
Reader's unread posts counts had become a scary number. With # 4 and 5, that number's smaller, without a change in the amount of information I'm fed.

I have now effectively come down to a few tens of posts everyday, which can be easily navigated through in under an hour, and many more posts get actually read now. :)

(This post was typed in Bend, a text editor worth at least a test drive. For now I'm keeping it for concurrent use with Q10.)