mamamusings: October 17, 2005

why you shouldn't be reading this

Paul Ford has written a remarkable essay on…well, on everything from interruptions and attention to web2.0 and blogging to philosophy and mortality.

Read it.

Or don’t. That would be good, too.

accidental reset

I was trying to get Bloglines to synch with NetNewsWire today, and somehow my Bloglines subscriptions all got marked as read—taking me from ~2000 unread items to zero. (And the sync didn’t work, either—only a fraction of my subscriptions actually seem to have properly updated in NNW. Feh.)

On the plus side, it was remarkably freeing to have all that unread stuff disappear. It’s not like I was ever really going to catch up.

And it helped to compensate for the misery of having spent 2+ hours going through email on my non-MS accounts, which I’ve neglected shamefully since starting my sabbatical. (If you want a fast response from me, you should use the MSFT address. If you don’t have it, you should call me. If you don’t have a phone number for me…well, that’s how I’m staying sane these days. Sorry.)

It’s amazing how much more angst and petty politics there is in the academic environment. It’s probably because as a temporary employee I’m spared many of the slings and arrows of MSFT politics. But that’s not all of it. Some of it is really that academics—who often spend their entire professional lifetimes working with the same small group of people—really do have an uncanny ability to drive each other crazy. It reminds me a great deal of the way my kids interact with each other. At the moment, I’m very very glad that I’m here and not there.