Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized' ↓

Wagoner, John Bernard (Jack) — On 21 February 2007, in Titusville Florida, USA. Aged 93 years. Loved husband, brother, father and grandfather. Survived by his wife of 65 years, Virginia; son, Rob (Kaikoura); brother, Bob (USA);daughters, Janice, Ann, Joan and Nancy (all, USA); grandsons, Seth (Christchurch), Luke (Hokitika), and Andrew (USA); granddaughter, Sarah (Dunedin) and step-grandaughter, Susan Lynn (USA). Will be missed by by family and friends in NZ and the US. At Jack’s request, no funeral service will be held. A celebration of his life, complete with fireworks as requested, will be held in Titusville, 4th of July 2007.

Grandad had a stroke a few weeks ago and he wasn’t doing too flash after that although it did look like he might pull through somehow. For the prior 93 years of his life he was mostly healthy apart from a few minor ailments, so on average he had a pretty good run. I do so wish I’d been able to get over there to visit him (and everyone else) during the last decade. My brother was lucky, he made it last year.

Grandad’s death has knocked the wind out of my sails somewhat, and because I’m the bottleneck, Interclue’s launch will probably be delayed again, so my apologies to all. There’s also been this insane madness with my (soon to be ex) Domain Name Registrar that I’ll have a long story to tell about later.

I toasted his life with a Johnnie Walker Blue Label at Dramfest 07. I think that’s a label he’d know and approve of, despite being more of a Bourbon man himself. I tried any number of rare and interesting Single Malts as well, but not so much in a mood for talking about it. Maybe later.

My parents have been very supportive as always. Love to them and all my family at this sad time in our lives.

Ah, you are. Good. I’m not, most of the time. Or rather, I’m paying attention to far too many things at once.

And of course, I am not alone. These days, attention is a scarce resource, and like any scarce resource, there are people trying to create a market for it.

The interesting thing about attention is that everyone has the same amount. You can’t get more than 24 hours a day no matter how wealthy you are - and unless you’re popping Ampakines (and given that they’re not currently available outside of clinical trials, you’re probably not), you’re stuck with a lot less than that.

In truth, I’m not completely sold on the AttentionTrust idea of recording everything you pay attention to specifically so that you can sell that information to people who want to market things to you. Ok, I can see in principal that it’s better that you have control over that data than others, but surely collecting your own attention data isn’t going to stop others from collecting and selling it as well, unless you put some effort into trying to stop them.

Attention is a limited resource - attention data, on the other hand, is increasingly common.

6-7 years ago I wrote a retail reporting application for a huge supermarket franchise operation, and I noted the way they were tracking people’s shopping habits using the first loyalty card in this country that worked across all sorts of different types of shop. At the time I thought “you know, these things are essentially tracking cookies in meatspace”. I never did get one of those cards, and shop people look at me funny now when I say I don’t have one. I presume the credit cards also aggregate shopping data and sell it, hopefully without any names attached, but who knows these days. The analogy isn’t perfect, shopping data isn’t attention data, they’re quite different, but still, I feel uncomfortable about people gathering that information, and almost as uncomfortable about gathering it myself and then selling it!

But keeping track of what you pay attention to seems like a good idea. I rather suspect it could be quite scary to see how many times my attention switched in any given day last year. I’m just not so sure about uploading that data to anyone else’s machine to do analysis on it. Perhaps I’m just being paranoid.

In any case, this year, I have resolved to be more mindful with my attention, because it turns out that the best way to get value for your attention isn’t multitasking, but to try your best to focus on one thing at a time. Well, not quite true - different parts of your brain can be paying attention to different things, but the language bits and the heavy thinking bits in particular are really not designed for heavy task switching.

A PC with a dozen applications open and a browser with 20 tabs open doesn’t help, thats for sure. This sort of technology driven reduction in attention span has two names that you might be hearing yet more of in 2007: Continuous Partial Attention (mostly benign), and Attention Deficit Trait (mostly malignant). Frankly I think I’ve been afflicted with the latter for this entire decade, while the former I’ve mostly managed to avoid. I don’t feel a huge need to stay connected to my peers, I’m an introvert. On the other hand I do feel strangely compelled to keep track of what’s going on in the worlds of science, technology, and politics, which has been a smeg of a lot lately, so I focus on a few key areas, but even those are impossible to keep up with.

PS: Our browser addon can increase your focus and reduce your context switching while you’re using the web. It’s by no means a magic bullet, but I’m hoping we might be able to raise your average working IQ a smidgen this year, and have you browsing a little more cluefully. We’re launching soon, honest, but do try the beta, we need more feedback.

PPS: Happy New Year. May it be a productive and prosperous one for all my readers. Sometime soon I’ll get around to posting all my New Years Resolutions, but like some other things I could mention, I’m still tweaking them for optimal performance.

Ok, so I showed this blog to my housemates, and they didn’t think it completely sucked, so perhaps I’ll actually tell other people it exists…

So, what’s all this then? Well, possibly a lot of things. For one reason or another, I haven’t blogged much in the last couple of years, so I’ve got a lot of posts to get off my chest. I’ve also got a new business launching soon, and that will get a certain amount of airtime here once it’s underway, but we’ll also have a dev-blog and biz-blog and that will be where I talk about that the most. This is more of a personal outlet.

The thing I’ll probably post most about here is philanthrogeeking, and philanthrohacking. Musings about what is good, how it might best be achieved, and who’s acheiving it. In general, I think an enormous amount of good can be done by smart people who are actually thinking about how they can maximise the beneficial effects of their time and money, rather than just work off some sort of internal guilt, or generate some positive PR for themeselves or their company.

Currently my philanthrogeeking is mostly in an observational role, with occaisional flights of fancy about what I might be able to achieve when I have more time and money. At the monent 95% of my time and money is going into the startup. I don’t really mind, because I think that as well as being quite profitable, our startup is going to do a lot of good for a lot of people. Mainly, just by making knowledge workers more productive, and their businesses more profitable, but I also think we might actually make the internet just a bit more valuable for everyone, and that makes me very happy.

What else is this blog for? Well I’ll occaisionally talk about software and web-apps that have impressed me or made my life easier. I might talk about productivity techniques like David Allen’s “Getting things Done” - a book that ought to be compulsary reading for every knowledge worker. If you’re really into this sort of thing, Gina Trapani’s lifehacker blog is compulsary reading.

As a geek with a philosophy degree, I might get a bit wordy and esoteric at times, for which I apologize in advance. I may also mix up my English and American spellings, for which I also apologise in advance. Blame it on the blogosphere.