The Art of Lazy

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Napping Cat

I looked at my website today and thought to myself: “Dude (that’s what I refer to myself as), you haven’t touched your blog in quite some time!” I quickly retorted, “Well, so? I drew a comic yesterday!”

I quickly decided that my level of achievement was acceptable. I also decided that the more balls I juggle, the more I’ll tend drop. When I become very busy (as mentioned previously) I get burnt out. In fact, we all do. I’m sure Noah can agree, he’s been the busiest guy I know. That’s okay though, he and I managed to record two podcasts this week!

So when Friday afternoon rolls around, I can tend to get a bit lazy. Saturday morning? Even lazier. Sunday? Well, let’s just say I woke up around lunchtime today. That’s not something I do very often given the fact that I worked 63 hours this week.

Do you ever feel the same kind of lazy? You know what I’m talking about, you had three finals in one afternoon or you just finished the biggest project of the quarter? At this point you just stop altogether, right? Good. We all need to master the art of lazy.

If I were to keep doing what I do I’d easily go insane. I looked at this weekend as so many empty days that I could fill with “productive tasks.” Here we are on Sunday and, put simply, screw that! Today I woke up, ate some Chipotle, checked email and then played tennis/worked out for three hours. That seemed like the truly “productive” way to spend today.

When you become stressed and keep subjecting yourself to that stress you start to hurt yourself. If I were to keep working on side projects this weekend I’d do more harm than good! Not only does stress start to cause problems with brain development (there was a new study I saw the other day, I should bookmark these things) but it causes so much agitation and friction in your life. You even start to affect all of those around you… don’t act like it doesn’t. I’m the first to admit my patience will wear thin; I’ve snapped at friends a few times. I’ve been snapped at too, I understand the reasoning!

So, my only advice is to take this 4th of July (Americans only, the rest of the world can remain stressed this week) to relax, forget about everything and just have some time away from it all. Think of how “simple” life was on the first Independence Day celebration… take away a bit of the complexities and just enjoy it.

Bonus: A quote from Scott Adams: The thing to remember about freedom is that it

Life With Women

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I’ve taken on a fun little project, a webcomic. I have little-to-no artistic ability but I have a lot of funny material. I’m debating, though, do the comic in MS Paint or draw by hand? Anyway, the comic is called Life With Women and I plan to provide a weekly dose of entertainment. If you just read this thinking I’m sexist or perhaps offensive, that’s fine, it just means you didn’t go visit the site and read my introduction.

YouTube Sucks

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I wanted to get some information on Tourgasm, Dane Cook’s cleverly named comedy tour. When I visited the official website I was greeted with “The official trailer for the brand new HBO Comedy Documentary Series – Tourgasm!” When you hit Play you’re told the video has been removed for, get this, copyright infringement! YouTube, you piece of shit. You removed the official trailier. Look at all these bootleg videos! I’m sorry but I had to go to MySpace to watch the trailers. You know you’re done when MySpace does better than you…

MySpace Blocks Creepy Adults

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MySpace is stupid as hell: “MySpace users who are 18 or over could no longer request to be on a 14- or 15-year-old’s friends’ list” (Link). Oh yeah, all those creepy adults can only see partial profiles, now. Mission accomplished, guys. Are you kidding me?! On a website where people are aged 69, 123, 184, and 92 how the fuck was a users ‘age’ determined as the best deterrent? Go look at my profile, I’m suddenly a 14-year old in 30 seconds.

RSS File Extension

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There has always been a bit of talk on RSS and whether or not it will be widely accepted. Many people suggest that ‘RSS’ doesn’t seem to flow off the tongue too easily. Why not, though? I don’t think we’re giving people much credit. People can be taught anything. Heck, we’re all still typing www. aren’t we? Does anyone know why? Additionally, I hear people instruct me to visit an .html page all the time. Do they know what HTML means? Most likely not. Do they know what .html pages are? Of course they do. That’s all they need to know.

So why don’t you think people can be trained to subscribe to RSS? People were easily hooked on email. As Brian mentioned, the concept of opting-in is hardly revolutionary. So why couldn’t the same be done for RSS? With browsers (and Vista) integrating RSS don’t you think people will naturally figure out the benefits? I agree, it’s hard to re-train people. But, the way I see it, people are increasingly finding more information online. If they wanted to get an email for every cheap fare and recipe available out there they’d realize thats just too much email (in addition to all the spam that would come along with it). Their friend will then say something to the tune of: ‘oh, you don’t know how to subscribe to that stuff’?

So why don’t we have a .rss file extension? Oh wait, we do, it’s called .xml. When I visit nytimes.com/…/Busines.xml I have a pretty good idea of what I’m about to open. In theory this file extension will open an XML file allow me and my browser/reader/whatever to open the feed the way I want. So why the hell doesn’t it work that way? I open a .html file in Firefox/IE and a website loads. I open a .doc file in Firefox/IE and a document loads. But when I open my .xml file I’m suddenly greeted with the most unfriendly looking collection of symbols, tags and words I’ve ever met. This is exactly why RSS hasn’t taken off yet. It lacks the consistency.

File extentions are there to create a certain level of consistency. In other words, when I open a .doc file I know I’m opening some sort of document. As a typical web user, when I open website.com/feed/atom.xml or something.com/rss/ how am I supposed to know what I’m visiting? When I see a page load with a bunch of nonsense like <channel> do I know what to do next? Of course not! So why isn’t my browser doing that for me? Why can’t I tell my friends to go to somewebsite.com/subscribe.xml (or even better, .rss) and have the computer do what it’s always done: recognize the extension and do something useful with it.

It’s way too hard to visit a website, search for 10 minutes for their ‘RSS’ or ‘Feeds’ or ‘Subscription’ page, copy the location, paste it somewhere, etc. If my friends can tell me to visit a .php or .html page I should be able to ask them (just as easily) to visit my .xml or .rss feed. Feeds will never get past early adopters if we don’t create some sort of consistent way to treat the user. I really don’t think renaming RSS will do the trick.

[tags]rss, xml, feeds, syndication, blogging[/tags]

Farecast Invitations

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Anyone interested in testing out Farecast? It’s a very nice (beautiful, functional) website to help predict and find the best fares based on price histories. Right now it only serves Seattle/Boston markets but it’s great to play around with. I have a bunch of invites; just leave a comment.