magpie's shiny things

I find the con­cept of man­aged knowl­edge to be sort of like steam­punk. How the world would be if we had been able to hang onto some cher­ish anachronism. 

So why do I do it?

Last week I had one of those days. There was noth­ing urgent on deck. Not that there’s not a lot of stuff hang­ing around. It’s just that I was stuck wait­ing for a lot of things that I don’t con­trol. So rather then bang my head against a lot of stalled projects I took the day off to explore. 

It’s good to once in a while take a day off from the cur­rent work, and pop my head up above the cubi­cle walls. (No i don’t real­ly have a cubi­cle — the Magpie cen­ter for world dom­i­na­tion is much bet­ter pro­vi­sioned that that.) 

I have an ongo­ing list of ‘cool’ and ‘inter­est­ing’ and ‘not urgent but try to find’ things. 

I looked at some job inter­view sto­ries, played with Eclipse, and browsed Etsy, and read a ton of sewing machine reviews. (I have a bad feeling … )

And what ever else passed my way. Because some­times it’s impor­tant to have look around at the world beyond the walls of the fort. You know?

I caught up on all the stuff I’ve not been read­ing in the feed-reader. I end­ed up ditch­ing anoth­er set of feeds. I think weed­ing on a reg­u­lar basis is impor­tant. Often a month or two or read­ing a blog is suf­fi­cient to fig­ure out what the author’s main point is and what issues you are going to want to fol­low in that blog. Then when a par­tic­u­lar top­ic is cir­cu­lat­ing you can go back and check in with that writer and get their take on it. But you don’t have to read it every­day. Does that make sense?

Smashing Magazine con­tin­ues to impress. List blogs are often dull and unin­for­ma­tive. But these guys (gals?) do it right. Pick a top­ic — go look at as many of the tools, resources, posts, what have you, as they can find. Give each one a good look­ing over and write it all up. Not just a bunch of links but insight com­ments about what you’re look­ing at — com­ments informed by expe­ri­ence in the field. For a design new­bie like me it’s invaluable.

I’ve been work­ing on mov­ing my hus­band’s weath­er data pages from our old host­ing sys­tem to our new host­ing sys­tem. As part of the new look I’m adding links to some of the sources of weath­er infor­ma­tion that he uses reg­u­lar­ly. One of these is the NOAA local fore­cast page. A few days after he sent me the URL he sent me an updat­ed one:

He writes:

I’d always kept a favorite link to the NOAA web site, where I get weath­er fore­casts. they have a lit­tle click­able map where you can click your spe­cif­ic loca­tion and get a spe­cif­ic fore­cast. but it’s a lit­tle map, and accu­ra­cy is dif­fi­cult, so I just clicked around ’til it said ‘5 miles east of duvall’ and fig­ured that was close enough. But no (OCD? me? not a chance, baby!). a few days ago I hap­pened to notice that the URL is obvi­ous­ly encod­ing the dec­i­mal lat-long in a sim­ple to read (and mod­i­fy!) format:
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/forecast/...
&textField1=47.7425&textField2=-121.98444
textField1 and textField2 are obvi­ous­ly lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude, in dec­i­mal for­mat. so I went to our local coun­ty GIS sys­tem, found my house, got the exact lat/long and cus­tomized the URL in my favorites fold­er. tada: a url that is cus­tomized ‘exact­ly’ for our loca­tion. not that it makes much dif­fer­ence, but it illus­trates the use­ful­ness of trans­par­ent URLs. 

Pretty slick huh? The URL is prob­a­bly not eas­i­ly read­able to most peo­ple to to a weath­er geek the lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude num­bers are both mean­ing­ful and recognizable.

As I get busier I find that my dai­ly blog/news/web read­ing habits change. What used to be a leisure­ly hour or so now gets squeezed into 20 or 30 minutes. 

What falls out and what stays makes for a kind of embar­rass­ing list. I read the fun­nies. Nine Chickweed Lane, Hello Kitty Hell, ICHC, and xkcd. A some friends and fam­i­ly blogs where only a few folks post more than two or three times a month. A lit­tle news (most­ly boing-boing — shal­low of me, eh?) a lit­tle of the con­sumer tech/gadget scene. 

The infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture, find­abil­i­ty, search, and inter­ac­tion design stuff falls off the screen. I end up scan­ning weeks worth at a time and blow­ing off most of it.

Oddly enough the one tech thing that I still read in depth is the mobile phone/device news. It fas­ci­nates me. It’s also com­plete­ly irrel­e­vant to any­thing I’m doing at the moment or am like­ly to be doing in the near future. Wonder why…

I’ve had enough of the del.icio.us link feeds that are clut­ter­ing up my rss feed read­er. People who used to post once or twice a week because they had some­thing inter­est­ing to say are now drop­ping 2, 3, or more links into my read­er everyday. 

I don’t need to fol­low their wan­der­ings around the web. If they can’t think of some­thing sub­stan­tial to say about some­thing they’ve found on the web then they should keep it to them­selves or at least with­in their del.ico.us (or what­ev­er) network. 

I’m going to miss the occa­sion bit of wis­dom (or cool­ness) from a few of them but the sig­nal to noise ration has gone over the knee and I’m clos­ing the channel. 

Harrumph