The Horizon

There is an amazing article written by Mark Pilgrim about the problems with DRM and books.  It revolves around issues with the current Amazon Kindle and specifically some of the marketing that the Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was doing.  This is a really good juxtaposition of some thoughts that have been running through everyone’s minds in regards to all of this.  I am glad to see that at least the music industry is starting to realize what a failure DRM has been. Let’s hope that as a people we remind Amazon that we don’t just hate Music DRMed, we hate the idea of DRM.

There’s a nice little article on concentration at lifehack.org.  It has a lot of tips as usually from the Lifehack.org crew.  Here is one way that the article says will help us improve our concentration:

Physical Alertness

The powers of our concentration depends a lot upon our physical well-being. If we are tired, unhealthy and afflicted by numerous minor ailments, concentration will be more difficult. Of course, concentration is still possible; it is just more difficult. However, we have to try to make life easy for ourselves; we need to give a high priority to our physical health - getting sufficient sleep, staying physically fit. Undertaking exercise will help develop our concentration. It will help if we lose weight, clear the mind and create a sense of dynamism. If you struggle to concentrate, we need to think of a holistic solution; good physical health and fitness will definitely help develop our powers of concentration.

One thing that I was thinking about while reading through the article is how much this could be applied to my ADHD.  I think it has some merit, particularly the tip that I have quoted here.  Because health can have very many interesting effects on how your day will go with ADHD.  Some of the others are certainly helpful, as supplements to a more rigorous prescriptive schedule.

I have this idea for a webapp that I have been working on for the past few days here.  It involves an RSS reading interface that would be more useful for people that are on the move or traveling in any way.  The reader actually has a robut audio interface that reads feeds as well as allowing the user to access traveling widgets and to move between and share feeds.

I like the idea because I have had times where I haven’t been able to actually sit at a computer and I want to get access to my news.  One especially useful scenario would be for driving.  When I’m driving I can’t exactly be staring at a computer screen (may it be a PDA, UMPC, or a laptop) because I have to keep my eye on the road.  So I could start reading a feed to me while I drive.  The app would also be able to recognize words that the user says to it.  Think of GOOG-411: You call and it gives you search results with numbers.  That would be each article in a feed. So the audio is going through some contents and the user says “4.”  This tells the webapp to actually read through article 4.  You could also tell the webapp while it’s reading the headline and teaser to “read this.”

I’m sure the idea is not unheard of.  I wonder if it would be difficult to implement such an application.  I am now making it my quest to learn enough to implement such an application as the one I outlined here.   This blog will, for the time being, be a project development log for this project.

The first step that I will take will be to figure out what I will need to know and whether or not I can do this in an open-source framework.  So I will begin searching for information on information systems :P.  I will then attempt to do some project outlining.  If anyone has anything that could help me in my quest, please do tell!

This is the emptiness that is existence. We are trapped here trying to unravel a mystery with no texts and no phenomena.

Escape is the route towards falling inward.

I wish that the New Left Network would grow. I have created a beautiful website for people to interact in a socially propogating way, just like Facebook or Myspace. Yet it seems that no one wants to join and become active. I understand that it is an entirely new system to understand and figure out. But I guess I would have thought that people would come and learn and then try to at least become involved before falling out of the loop.

I hope that over time, this will change and people will come to the network and see how cool it is. But for now, I am stuck with just continually pushing it, on forums, on blogs, everywhere. If anyone knows of a place that would be interested in a social network targeting radicals and lefitsts, then please go and tell them about this!