i.justrealized

Random note: Don’t buy newspapers, queue up at 7 a.m. and get it for free. And don’t bring home newspaper; disposing them is a hassle. Better yet, get news online and hug some trees at the park.

The amount of hassle involved in obtaining newspaper such is not that worth it if you think about it. How many times do you make an informed decision based on a news event? Hardly for me. I don’t mind getting my news one week late or view a consolidation of news since newspapers are a day late anyway.

My only issue with getting late news is that I end up missing out on the beginning since the news article report only the progression of the event; this makes the news article difficult to understand. I probably need something like a recap that typically isn’t available in newspaper. What I want is probably a news magazine and not a newspaper. We do not have localized news magazines like the fortnightly-published Newsweek.

Furthermore, newspaper reports can be bias; Singapore is ranked 147 out of 167 in the Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index for 2004. In Singapore, since we only have one English non-tabloid newspaper, there is little competition on who can provide better news coverage. Also, there’s no way to see how objective a newspaper is if there is no other local newspaper to compare with.

These days, I just wait for local news to come to me.

Okay, as I was saying, my computer’s getting kinda cluttered and things are just getting harder and harder to find. I use Windows Vista Business, I have multiple copies of Apache, MySQL, Ruby, PHP and other this sort of programs in my computer. If you don’t know what they are, you probably wouldn’t like my blog, maybe you’d be better off at BoingBoing or watching some inspiring videos at TED.

The problem with having multiple copies is that you don’t know when to launch what. Every time I want to – say – launch MySQL, I start thinking really hard which folder should I go into. And when my mind is kinda switching off I often find my mouse pointer moving towards Safari browser icon and visiting Digg.com. Counter-productivity at the very best or worst – you decide.

I always tell myself, okay, next time when I re-setup my computer I’ll do this and that and so on… Each time I re-setup my computer, I always find a flaw with my existing setup. I will restructure my folders again, partition things differently this time. And I always have this optimistic thought that this time I’m really getting it right.

I rarely do. Two months later I would look back at my system thinking of new ways to refine my setup for the future.

Maybe the problem isn’t with me. Maybe the problem is with just the way computers are. All these labyrinth-like hierarchy of folders, it’s more messy than my family tree. Some day, we should kill the ideas of folders, they’re a good way of organizing things but today with people storing more and more files, the concept of folders is hardly a good idea.