btw - blogger - I love you!! Thank God you added "autosave" as IE just died on my and i could see the content behind the "Send Error Message to Microsoft" and thought i had lost it!!
One of the real frustrations for me is that i miss out on some very cool content on the web. I have a wife, two kids, some consultancy and trying to create a startup at the same time (which is now coming on very well). Thankfully I am going to have a lot of free (i.e. my own) time soon (i hope) as the consultancy (to buy food which is apparently an "important part of childrens diet" etc) is coming to an end.
However, there is what seems like endless content out there - and there is a wealth of really good stuff too!! I have Gnomedex, Always On, Scoble Show and (thanks to Sam) Intruders.tv - as well as IT Conversations etc - and that is just rich media. My BlogLines keeps going up to 4000 posts... i secretly think Scoble is multi-threaded to get through all this.
So how to balance this out? Well, other than the short viewings that can be done between things or on my PDA, i have decided to dedicate at least 3 of my evenings watching online content (say between 7pm and 10pm). At the weekends I should also be able to catch up on some. I don't watch much TV anyway (other than football), but continuing to purely code can also work against you as you miss all this content.... and what i have found is that a lot of it actually feeds in to what you are doing and either changes what you are doing or the way you are doing it - and sometimes i creates completely new ideas or angles - this is exactly what happened after I listened to Robert Scoble talking with Scott Klemmer Stanford.
This will clearly affect my coding time, but some of the things I learn that have a direct impact on what i am interested in is just too important. I actually think the net effect will be better coding - or rather higher quality results.
How is anyone else coping with this (who is in a similar situation?). There is no way we can catch everything, but there is also no way some this can be missed .... and i have long since lost the illusion of remembering to go back to see it or checking my bookmarks! If i don't watch it there and then, i likely will never.
This isn't really work for me - it's like reading a good book when listening to some of these podcasts and videos so moving from traditional TV isn't hard (it's even easier with the stuff that they show over here). However, it's also very important that i spend plenty of family time with my wife and kids, who aren't quite as interested as me (yet [rubs hands as scary laughter roars out....]).
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I'm not nearly as busy and there is only one person who needs my time (me, actually) so, no, I'm not in the same boat. I am, however, lazy. Fortunately, all of my friends are very intelligent and hungry to learn, and they pass along all of the very important information.
It works.
Aye - you may have something there - but then you haven't met my friends yet! (kidding if any friend read this.... ah, fek)
Well, it took a while, but I finally got round to my reading! ;-) I share the problem of not enough time but Google Alerts really help, as I get a daily reminder with links to go read. That's certainly great for my professional interest stuff though it doesn't throw up quirky stuff that I didn't even know I needed to know. For that I'm dependent upon colleagues who post links into our live chat throughout the day, usually with ascerbic comments ;-) And some of the online community groups that I belong too, though perhaps that's because I'm interested in online community. Since I've still got my old computers,it's interesting to go back and look at browser favourites - a big indicator of what I used to read. Only 6 sites have stood the test of time and are still there after 7 years. The others have been replaced as interests have changed. The only way I think I'll get better is when I have internet specs or something so that I can multitask while cooking, walking etc!
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