The link goes to a great article on Internet Information Overload (my own term). I've recently become aware that I've been monitoring way too much information on the Web, and I've decided to cut down and quit wasting time on things I don't need to know.
Do I really need to know all the *very* latest developments in Mac gaming and iPod hardware? No... so the MacCentral feed got chucked from my Bloglines subscription list. Do I really need to see all of the latest popular items, as bookmarked by the geeks who populate del.icio.us? Nope... there went the "del.icio.us popular" feed. I'll still use del.icio.us to store all of my own bookmarks, since it's great and it allows me to see my marked pages from any computer, but I don't need to immerse myself in "the geek subculture" quite so wholeheartedly.
When it comes to computers, I'm really not much more than a hobbyist. I've only built one Windows machine from scratch, and I haven't programmed anything since the silly list.bas BASIC thing a friend and I worked on in high school (it was a "password-protected" and "encoded" GWBASIC database we each made to list the girls we liked at the time).
I'm not a computer scientist. I'm not a Web programmer. I'm not a newshound. Why was I trying to fill my head with all of the latest information out there on all of these subjects? I'm a music theorist, and I'm headed to grad school soon (hopefully... I'm currently working on an application). I need to focus on the kinds of things that will help me in my future academic career. So lately I've been brushing up on Schenker's ideas about harmony and voice-leading and trying to review the German I took in college.
This isn't to say that computers will play no part in my future endeavors... I'm certain that they will. But I need to relegate hobbies to their rightful place on the side, and get to them when I have the time and energy. My Christianity, my wife, and my schoolwork need to take their rightful place in my life (in that order), and I need to stop playing around with stuff that is "just fun" but not eminently useful where I'm headed in life.
So here I go... the new, more dedicated me. You can even check my Bloglines public subscriptions (there's a link in the left sidebar and in the page header) and see that I'm not going to be making myself sift through quite so much stuff anymore. I'm making time for what's important.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
The Geek Code desperately needs updating, but in any case here's mine (as of 2010-02-28):
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GIT/MU d+(-) s:+>: a C++> ULXB++++$ L+++ M++ w--() !O !V P+ E---
W+++ N o++ K? PS PE++ Y+ PGP t !5 X- R- tv+@ b++ DI++++ D--- e*++
h--- r+++ y+++ G+
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
If you really care about knowing what that all means, you either know the code already, or you can get it decoded for you here.
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