Hourglass

How short human life is. X-ty years and counting. Only a tiny variable of time dimension, coming without a long and complicated equation. Minus some for slumber, deduct a chunk for daily necessities of boring repetitive daily routines, donate parts to the tasks we don’t like but inevitably do, and still it’s away for many other negativities. What we have left then in the equity?

How pitiful human life can be. Living to the fullest and kicking. Its fate later to be snatched away on some random accidents, unlucky diseases, flying bullets. You’re in the height of the success in a moment and left crushed in the next second. Are you even at least left with a merciful second to think how unfair it is?

How squandered human life may be. Given and thrown. Spending the life for whatever war and mischieves, sacking yours for whoever dead idol, exploding your own away to take others for whichever belief. Is that for some reasoning or it’s taken for granted?

Don’t trust Albert Einstein, there is no time relativity. Time just flows like a constant speeding pace even at mind. 1, 10, 20 and it comes exponentially, suddenly you’re there at the end. How many clicks do we have left? How are we going to use them? Some are crying for better odds, some are blaming the unfair God, some are just torn before… born. Triumphant by birth, blessed by goodness, are we doing any better?

Whether it’ll be an I who could be enough of sharing happiness to others – I don’t know if I will. If I’ll just be able to inspire others, I don’t know. And if all the dreams and the hopes, in the end I fail to achieve, please spare me. I will try to spare myself at the end. Since perhaps it’s just perfect enough, if it ends with a smile.

Wealth and Happiness

Wealth increases human happiness when it lifts people out of abject poverty and into the middle class but not thereafter (Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness.
The bewildering array of choices that wealth brings not only doesn’t make us happier but actually erodyes our psychological well-being. (Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice).
Spending money on other people has a more positive impact on happiness than spending money on oneself. (Dunn et al., Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness).
Quoted from some page of Boing Boing, to remind myself that money doesn’t ascertain happiness. In many cases, it doesn’t bring true happiness. But again, can you be happy without money?

Vagueness

Things I don’t like, things I don’t want, things I really crave for, things I will have a jolt for receiving, things I.. just don’t know. Recently, I’m getting blurry and can’t forgive myself for being so. I chose for this, don’t fret! Live on! Move on! But I haven’t.

Some people say, this is the crisis for the first ticking clock of adapting. Heck, I thought I had been there, overcame it, dealed with it. Haven’t I? Again, this could be just some silly vagueness which recuperate from time to time.

I have things I want to write, unfinished. I have assignments of job I’m damn worried about, haunted. I have dreams I want to aim, not there yet. Life is not an instant noodle I guess. No. Life is a process which youngsters can’t help to be impatient. I am.

Again and again, I may have just been melancholic, sick, down. In the end, the first thing I really need to bother is fixing my health first and pour the mood to myself. So worry less about work, dreams, things, for now. Let my physical body rest, my brain is just acting up too much. Ciao!

News on the Move with Offline RSS Reader on Mobile Device

RSS feeds has actually been a part of my internet experience for quite a while. It really helps me to read news efficiently, minimising the overhead time needed to click between pages of websites and save my time to select the important news. But nowadays, as the job gets tighter and the time gets lesser, I have even tinier and tinier time space to read my fav news provider and blogs which is very much disturbing me. I come to realize that the best free time I have is usually during my commute in the trains or buses, hence I need to find a way to compress everything into my mobile device.

I did quite a research and trial on quite lots of RSS reader out there available for my Windows Mobile device: Viigo, Ibrow,NewsReader,goNewsTouch, but none really satisfied me. As my PPC is not a powerful device, only equipped with 200 Mhz TI-OMAP, I really need to find an RSS reader which is lightweight, efficient, but still powerful and maintain a professional look. I finally fall in love with pRSSreader for its simplicity but elegant, very lightweight, and  features important features like RSS image icons, RSS groupings/channels and most importantly very nice articles caching and offline-mode which allows you to download all the contents of RSS and keep them in your device without the necessity to reconnect to the internet later.

Offline-mode is very important to me as I don’t have any data plan for my mobile device which will be very expensive if I have to download articles per KB base. Not to mention, my old device doesn’t support 3G yet which will even lessen the experience of online reading due to slow data transfer. It even has a weak battery. With the offline feature in the pRSSreader, I can download the feeds while my device is USB cradled (active sync) and charged during my stay in the office or at home so it can use my notebook internet which of course will be faster and most importantly – free. Later, I can read the updates during my commute.

Even the offline-mode will still be very convenient for the more powerful device-owners with good data plan. Downloading using the home broadband typically will still be faster plus it can save your battery during your commute. Also, since the page is cached, you can switch rapidly between articles.

pRSSreader on my HTC Prophet

The real challenge is now in finding those RSS news feeders which provides full text article instead of just a synopsis or even merely the header of the articles. This is important since you won’t have to connect to the internet later from your device just to read the full article which is on the websites. While this is easy for casual blogs, technology or health blogs as they mostly provide full article in their feeds, but as for the news websites, this can be pretty challenging. Local news content like detik, vivanews, straitstimes, to the international: BBC, CNN, yahoo, typically provide only partial RSS feeds which is of course logical. Those articles may only be provided for premium services or they want more clicks on their website which substantially will create more revenues.

Some news websites below provide full text rss feeds:

- theguardians ( UK news paper)

- engadget (Tech blog)

- techcrunch (Tech blog)

- todayonline (Singapore weekly paper)

- boing boing (event blog)

- BBC website through feedburners are also already hacked for their full contents article such as: http://feeds.feedburner.com/bbcnewsenglandfullfeed

Hope this article helps. This tips should work for any operating system if you can find an RSS reader that supports caching for your device. Please let me know if you happen to know any Indonesia local news full text RSS provider. Or if anyone is keen to hack them, please let me know the result. The how-to is provided in the net (just google them). Happy reading!

Information and Knowledge

They say there is a certain limit of data that human brain can capture, comprehend and store a day which means we are actually limited in devoting our learning process throughout our life. Those processes also take times which are never plentiful for us. The older we get, the harder for us to learn new things. We even tend to forget more things like my colleague has been complaining, “old age” they say.

In that case, should I start controlling the data which I’m trying to squeeze into my memory? Some of them of course are uncontrolable, you just happen to encounter them during your daily life although they may be unnecesary like there is a clothing discount in store A area B which you may not even be interested at all. But on the other hand, this process is pretty much controllable for other things, like picking the book to read, or even to read newspapers, novel book or science magazine. They are done fully out of your consciousness.

There are two sets of data, whether they’re information – like the trend in stock market or the unreset in China -, or knowledge – what is aurora borealis, and why animals are named in binomial nomenclature. Information is pretty much valid for only certain period of times and captures random happenings which of course is tied to time frame, often provided by newspapers. But knowledge serves more to explain things like origins, mechanism, process which usually can be applied over and over and are not limited to a single timeframe.

Knowledge and information also inhibit different functions. Knowledge is very useful in an attempt trying to resolve or pull a decision on many different occasions which have similar attributes. Information is often only relevant on very specific case. Other similar case may requires different sets of information although the same knowledge can be applied. For example: you’re installing a windows on different computer. The same knowledge of windows installation can be applied but what computer name to be put, what is the primary network connection to be set – wireless or LAN -, they will rely on the information provided on the specific installation.

I often start clicking straittimes, detik, or jumping between pages of wikipedia, from the capital market, all the way to interstellar travel. This way, I’m wasting quite tons of time reading those information I actually require or those I may not even require.  I come to think I really need to really spend my time more efficiently by selecting the readings I will pick. This way as well will prevent myself to get overflooded.

But in a practical case, how do you define which sets of data is relevant or not relevant for you? Or whether it’s more important to dig more knowledge instead of information or vise vers? They are pretty much inconceivable for me. I know some people with very logical basis may also say, “Just learn through and through, you never know you may need them. Whatcha say?