Ease of Distraction

This weekend was pretty uneventful except for a couple of crazy football games (I can't believe USC beat Notre Dame), hence the lackluster topic I'm going to start off exploring. Before I start though I thought I'd mention that with regard to the poll in my lst post I think I'm going to go with Batman Begins DVD because I think I'd be more happy with that than either of the other two despite how great Memento is as well. Thanks to all 5 of you who voted. The NY Times has a pretty extensive article studying the short attention spans of people at their office and makes a number of interesting discoveries. Did you ever think that the size of your screen affects how efficient you are or how cluttered your computer is correlates to how much you lack calmness? People just love multi-tasking so much that they don't realize that too much of it can have a negative effect on your productivity. This is probably why so many college students have to stay up so late to get real work done. Page four of the article offers some worthwhile tips if you have a real problem with getting distracted and the last couple of pages explore whether Microsoft will put out an OS that tries to alleviate some of these issues. It's a worthwhile read if you're curious about the science of getting sidetracked.

Speaking of Windows though, there's now some pressure from the nerd community for competing RISC OS to be made open-source. I'm sure that many of you haven't heard of RISC, which is because it hasn't advanced much in recent years and is leading to this outcry for a community-based approach. It's a good OS being mislead, in my opinion. If you're pissed off that you have to download like four different IM clients to talk to all your friends online then have no fear because the Tech Zone feels your pain and would like to make progress towards more openness in the protocols. You should definitely follow the advice they give. Lastly, I like to entertain opposing opinions from time-to-time so I thought I'd plug this editorial claiming that the iPod Video really isn't going to be making huge waves. Though he does make some great points I feel that the television industry will get caught in the same bind as the music industry was just a few years ago if they don't hop on board.

I don't know how, but the critically-hated movie The Fog managed to get the top spot in the box office at a little over $12 million. Anyone else think that the movie industry is screwed? Domino freakin' opened at less than $5 million, which sucks because that movie actually looked good. Clint Eastwood has put some good movies out there and now he's actually going to release two movies at once from both perspectives of the Battle at Iwo Jima (American and Japanese, of course). It's an interested idea, but I think in series would be better than in parallel. The only other thing worth mentioning is that the site for Clerks 2 put up some really random videos for your viewing pleasure featuring such excitement as this:



Now for some Unconscious Mutterings:

I say ... and you think ... ?

1. On the verge::Brink
   
2. Tempestuous::Tempest
   
3. Coherent::Incoherent
   
4. Near death::Epiphany
   
5. Illiterate::Book
   
6. Why not?::Why?
   
7. Period::Exclamation mark
   
8. Long lost::Love
   
9. Torrid::Passion
   
10. Nail::Bed