Idlemind - nickcoster.com
Future gazing from a quiet corner of cyberspace.

Friday, 23 January 2004
Well this is not cool. I have just hopped onto a train to get back to the office but it is going nowhere. There is something is weird going on outside. I can hear shouting and angry voices. The rail announcement has just announced that the train has been delayed until further notice. This is not a good sign.
16:32 ? We?re off !! It sounded like there was some sort of ?domestic? issue going on out there! In fact the station announcement just said that the train was delayed for ?personal reasons? !
16:43 - I was meant to be back at the office 45 minutes ago. This sucks. The train has stopped again. I think that they just wanted to move the train away from the station to avoid an uprising of some sort. Oh well, this allows for a little time for quiet reflection.
16:47 ? Time Management. This week I have started to employ a new ?Personal Efficiency Program? to learn how to better use my time and organize my life. So far so good. (16:49 ? moving again). The system employs a first rule, ?Do It Now!?, and I am enjoying using it. There is another good rule which is harder to actually practice, and that is ?Swallow the biggest toad first?. It refers to the idea that if I have 2 tasks and they are both-ugly and distasteful to get working on, then do the worst one first. Maybe this weekend is should list my tasks in order of toadyness.
16:58 ? still on the train. I should have walked home. Apparently a train has broken down in the city and there are not enough people to fix it.
17:00- nearly there, gota go?

Today I feel that this site has somewhat come of age. Up untill now I have only been chatting to myself and a few friends and family who care to take a look from time to time. This is because this little site has sat here in its quet corner of the Internet universe with out any connection to the outside world. It is all very well to point links to other places but if nothing is directed back to you then you are still alone.

Over the past few weeks I have been reading a book called “Linked - How everything is connected to everything else and what it means for business, science, and everyday life”. This is one of many books about networks, the Web, small worlds, scale free systems and their ubiquity, complex systems and so on. As you can imagine all of these ideas are linked to each other as well.

For the first time I discovered a link from another web site to this one. As trivial as this may be in function, the connectivity that it opens up is not. You see, the site that linked to this one can be found on Google which means that my page is only 2 links away from the effective center of the Internet.