Laid Off

Laid-Off: A No Nothing Production

A classic and newly relevant. Off to get some Coff-ay. More later.

Attention Conversation Notice (ACN)

I was trying to figure out where I had picked this one up recently and finally did. It is part of Viridian Note 00002: Viridian List Mechanics by Bruce Sterling.

… It is easy to cut-and-paste
huge archives of found text and images, and to bomb
one’s hapless correspondents with them. The time and
attention of recipients suffers badly, since the work of
distribution can be accomplished in seconds, while parsing
all that text, and finally deciding that it is useless,
can take seemingly forever.

…

Our first formal innovation is an attempt to steal as
little of your attention as we can. …

This effort, however, may not be enough. You may
still find yourself painfully tempted to actually *read*
the Note. We therefore offer a backup safety system, our
unique “Attention Conservation Notice.” This will begin
each Note by explaining to you, in some brief detail, why
you should NOT read it.

…

Since the list editor has already taken the trouble to
figure out what’s wrong with it, you might as well know,
too.

The standard notices he lists are great though. No forum should be without!

With time, we hope to develop a standard set of
“Attention Conservation” disclaimers that will save you
much mental processing time. In future, the following
warnings may see considerable use in this list:

“Highly speculative;” “Beautifully phrased but offers no
evidence to support its claims;” “Of interest mostly to
technical specialists,” “Written in postmodernese;”
“Infested with subcultural jargon,” “Grimly accurate
assessment, can cause feelings of despair,” “Contains violent
partisan attacks,” “Writer’s original language not
English,” and so forth. (At least, those disclaimers
would be of huge benefit in most of the lists that we’re
reading right now.)

Great stuff. This goes into the Glossary and will lead into an article on attention economy at some point.

Reference

http://fractional.blogspot.com/2004/12/attention-conservation-notice-this.html

Mint

So I recently got around to trying out Mint. I had read about it in a list of best web apps for 2007, I suspect it made several. It is really amazing to be able to see almost all of my information at a glance across all the various financial institutions I have accounts with. The ways they handle the security issues are ingenious and thorough.

It took me less than an hour to get my 9 accounts added, most of that time was looking up or resetting passwords. A few days later and a couple hours more time, including poking around at all the options, and I had all of my expenses for the last month categorized. I now have a better view of my financial situation than I’d have imagined possible until seeing Mint.

Part of what Mint offers is a list of credit cards that will save you money based on what cards you have now and how you’ve spent money over time. I’ve been meaning to take a look around for some new cards to consolidate my current debt so seeing what Mint served up was a good impetus.

Next post I’ll look at some of the green credit cards I stumbled upon and how they will help in my quest to offset carbon. Mint is the biggest thing I’ve found online for personal finance since Fool’s School. I’ve added mint.edu to my reader based on Three Principles of Personal Finance: All You Need to Know for Financial Success. While obviously well biased towards Mint the article breaks it down into 3 basic principles and 4 big expenses very well. Lots of good links and further resources. Enjoy!

WordPress.com

I’ve done oh… 90% of what I’ve wanted a web page to do in the last 10 years in under an hour.

Out-of-band management

I wanted an OpenID to tie all my Basecamp projects together and have had a need for an out-of-band journal.

Here it is. Enjoy!