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Tim Gray, writing in the New York Reviews of Books, has a very interesting article that asks whether it has become impossible to find the uninterrupted blocks of time that are needed to read serious works of literature, and whether the change in the reading environment is also changing how books are written.
Ordinarily I ignore the "Computer Bad! Destroy Society!" arguments, but I have to say that what he describes seems all too familiar. I can't recall the last time that I actually sat down for two or three hours just to read.
I grew up spending hours each day, every day devouring books of all sorts. Is this a thing that's lost to people raised with Internet, Game Consoles, and Smartphones? Pardon me if I sound like an old fart.
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Is Always On Tech Destroying Our Ability To Read?
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Alas, how love can trifle with itself!
-- William Shakespeare, "The Two Gentlemen of Verona"
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday June 15 2014, @12:09PM
"And you know what I'd be doing?"
I have spent decades of my working life writing little scripts to automate the whole process including exception reporting and alerting when it inevitably runs off the rails. Automated systems to restart the process under some failure conditions is interesting.
First you make a big state machine flowchart where every process has a pass/fail. The a script to figure out what state you're in and how to get to the next state. No need to make it event driven if it "works" 24x7 who cares if its only 95% efficient. Then run that script (which hopefully executes in less than 1 minute) every minute.
When you get fancy you install an off the shelf batching / queuing system and if you have distinct resources then set them up as reservable in the queuing system and just load it up and let 'er rip. So only one process (or two or whatever) tortures the database while another floods the network or whatever. Also put little plugins for munin graphs and nagios alerts in so its all compatible with the rest of the system.
If you're doing something CLI / unix-ish this is trivial. If doing something GUI, you're outta luck those kill productivity.
So at work I am able to read a work related book, and at home I can read any book I feel like, until I get a failure alert.