All or Nothing
This week has been pretty tough. Ignoring the fact that I came down with something desperately unpleasant during the night which meant I barely slept from my muscles screaming, I’ve been stupidly busy and stressed over the last few days. A combination of Fresher’s Fayre, trying to force Human Resources to pay me, and desperately trying to sort out the rest of my life (my PhD has now been defered until next October) has left me tired and unhappy. This is not what I was expecting from working part time doing a job I like. I haven’t even really managed to get any of my real work done at all.
One of the things that’s continually stressing me is trying to keep up with all my correspondance and online activites. As someone who works in the tech field, it’s expected that I keep on top of my emails, as well as facebook, Redgloo (Reading Uni’s social network for the School of Systems Engineering), and whatever else is in vogue currently. The problem is, of course, that when you spend a lot of time actually out doing stuff and trying to keep everything going on the ground level you don’t get a lot of time to do that kind of thing. Even a couple of hours away from a net connection can throw me massively behind as I can’t respond to emails as and when they turn up, and what should have taken me an hour spread across the whole day suddenly becomes a long and tedious chore as I scrabble to keep on top of everything.
So am I saying that internet connectivity is causing me stress? Well, no, but I almost wrote a blog post saying exactly that – dependence on online communication is a serious problem, and we need to strike a careful balance. But after thinking about it some more I realised that actually the major problem was not the connectivity itself, but the occasional bursts of it where you try and catch up on all the time you weren’t online. If you spend all your time in front of a computer coding or whatever then it’s actually easier to keep on top of things and it doesn’t stress you out nearly as much. If you can respond to things as you work it breaks down into nice managable chunks, and it doesn’t seem like an insurmountable task in the same way. But when you peel yourself away from the lab (which, I’m constantly told, is the “healthy” thing to do) then it’s all stress stress stress.
What’s far more irritating about this is that it doesn’t need to be so stressful. I actually have many individual minutes when I’m out an about to catch up with this kind of thing, but I’m perpetually defeated by technical limits. The fifteen minutes I’m on the bus, or the lull in the crowds when you’re manning the desk at an event, or any of the other hundred moments that crop up during the day when I’m not actually doing anything at all could be spent just to keep on top of things, but almost universally I’m out of wireless range, or my laptop is too unwieldy to use at the time, or it’s simply out of battery.
Now some people solve this problem by using their mobile phones to connect to the internet and keep on top of things that way, and I agree this is definately a good start (if an expensive one – currently very much not within my budget) but it doesn’t solve the problem completely. Firstly, connections to mobiles tend to be pretty poor, and even if I am connected my data is in so many different places that it takes me forever to check through everything if I’m not permenantly logged in.
As my friend Pat would tell me, what I need is a MeAggregator.
Let me give you some background on that.
There’s a small project team doing some work on a project called MeAggreggator who I’ve done some work with recently. The idea is, in theory, deceptively simply: The MeAggreggator collects and aggregates my data and correspondance from many different sources into one simple to use central location so I can keep up to date on everything at once, and provides a universal toolbar so I can control this content to suit my prefered online persona. Actually, now I say it, it’s not simple at all… no, really, it’s not. But it is happening (I designed the lovely shiny PC interface for it), and hopefully there should be a working prototype in the next few weeks. What I need is a MeAggregator for my phone. I’ll make a note to mention mobile technologies to people in the next meeting.
Also what would help is better mobile connectivity and access. Currently the best thing available for mobile “anywhere” internet access is the KDDI/AU CDMA2000-1x-WIN service which runs at about 2.4 Mbps on a good day, but slows down horribly when the network is busy and is incredibly prohibative both financially and geopgraphically. Most of us are stuck with 3G, which runs at a measely 200kbit/s – not really fast enough for modern web usage that approaches anything remotely intensive. Luckily, there’s a new system just around the corner – 4G – which is supposed to be roughly 20Mbps. Whilst it’s likely it’ll really cost you to start with, these kind of services tend to drop in price relatively quickly, and it seems reasonable that we, the techie masses, will get our hands on it pretty soon. I’m told they’re already testing it in Korea, which bodes well.
So yes, give me a MeAggregator and a 4G phone, and my stress will just fade away. Until then, I guess I’m stuck living with it, or living at my computer.
It’s a tough choice right now, let me tell you.
Tags: 3G, 4G, connectivity, email, Facebook, internet, MeAggregator, mobiles, phone, Redgloo, stress
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