IT: Fortitude, perseverance, and rational thinking: Three things this industry needs more of

Warren Zevon used to say that "Life'll Kill Ya". As inevitable as that sounds it's also true that stress will send you there sooner. For the third time in my career I'm burnt out due to stress, but not like you'd think. It's not the crazy hours, the staying up all night to deploy code or do system maintenance, or even the stress of deadline pressure. Sure those things can get to you, but nothing is takes more of a toll than the coffee.

Unlike many tech people I don't have a caffeine addiction. Sure I can't start the day without a shot in the arm, or gullet as it may be, but overall will survive without my morning beverage. That said I drink coffee, I enjoy coffee, I love coffee. While I don't suffer from a debilitating withdrawal when I skip, I still miss it. Sure the caffeine buzz is great but what I really miss is the flavor, the complexity, and the hot steamy sinus clearing goodness that squeezed from only the finest beans.

To put it another way and to illustrate exactly how bad my obsession has become I'll tell you about perfect day. I'd wake up at around 8am but lie around until about 8:30. I'd then rise to the sweet smell of a Sumatra or Dark Colombian blend emanating through the house. I'd spend the next hour and a half answering emails, checking Twitter and facebook and then do a little light HTML coding, enjoying several cups along the way.

Around noon I'd break for lunch and then head out into the backyard for a little sun. I'd be mighty parched and nothing would satisfy better than a little afternoon delight, probably a milder medium roast blend and a pack of Nabs. If I happened to feel a little adventurous I might mix in a little cognac for an extra kick. Evening would follow with a cold beer and an all-you-can-eat seafood extravaganza.

Unfortunately the perfect day would have to be a weekend because the typical workday looks more like this: Wake, clean, drop kids off, make coffee, check servers, drink coffee, write code, eat lunch, zonk out due to food, make more coffee, drink coffee, get really wired and write a bunch more code, have "conversation" with the office equipment about its inability to collate properly, drive home, wrangle kids, eat more food, zonk again, avoid TV, mess around on Internet, not sleep like I should. Rinse, repeat.

You may notice that this isn't the best way to enjoy the coffee, which I practically chug out of habit. So it should come as little surprise that such a self reinforcing cycle has burned a hole in my stomach for the third time in my short career. The good news is I've switched back to green tea and limited the java intake to a single cup. Eventually the revolt in my stomach will subside, but until then I have to stay away from many of my other favorite foods like chili peppers and hot sauce. As I near the ripe old age of 33 I'm thankful that this minor affliction is the only medical issue I have. Besides it's probably my body's way of telling me to stop pushing so hard and to enjoy life.

I'm a sucker for the latest and greatest website or service. There are hundreds of sites on the Internet where you can share your favorite music, photos, or pointless musings. While it's great to have so many sites to choose from it can be a pain for casual followers who are more accustomed to getting everything in one spot. I recently commented that my goal for the next few weeks was to unify my many, disparate feeds into one easy to follow stream of information.

So why would I want to do that? For starters any capacity for anonymity the Internet possessed is long gone. These days there are sites that specialize in archiving web pages, message boards, and even a record or every domain name you've ever owned. To make matters worse services like YouTube and facebook have long toyed with the concept of content ownership and leave serious doubt about how easily one's information could be removed. Simply put you can post few things these days which are ultimately tied back to your real identity.

The second, less paranoid, reason for content unification is because of the sheer amount of data there is to wade through. In a given month I update information or content on five or six different sites. If you weren't tied into all of those sites chance are you missed something. I may upload photos to Flickr, publish a story here about my vacation while at the same time commenting on the day-to-day experiences on facebook or twitter. In order to get the entire story you'd need to monitor all of those channels.

You could subscribe to half a dozen RSS feeds or you could consolidate the feeds into a single feed and rebroadcast it. In some circles this is called Lifecasting but to me that term is too specific. The point is not simply to broadcast one's life events across the web, but instead to pick À la carte the services you'd like to use and to bring them together into the total experience.

In my case the solution was a service called friendfeed. The site takes the various RSS feeds from your social media sites and combines them. I was able to pull feeds from YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr and this site all into a single feed. I was also able to automatically sync posts between Tumblr and Twitter automatically via a new feature the site implemented. I topped the entire system off by importing the friendfeed information as standard RSS into facebook which has become the central hub of my information.

Truthfully the system sounds much more complicated that it is. To set up the entire process all I had to do was collect the various RSS links from my public pages and paste them into friendfeed. In many cases friendfeed already has a custom import setup so that content is added to the new feed in a meaningful way.

After much strife the new InfoMountain.Org is online! The new site is powered by the latest incarnation of the popular content management package Joomla. The migration from version 1.x to 1.5 was a major one but included some major functionality changes. Over the next few weeks I'll continue adding more modules and features to the site. One item I'm still on the fence over is the ability to post comments. In the old days this was the only way to leave feedback, however these days the popularity of micro blogs, trackbacks, etc have made it incredibly easy for folks to respond to my articles via their site.

Speaking of micro blogs I've added a new service to the lineup called friendfeed (ff). Friendfeed collects your various rss feeds and social site activities into one "lifestream". The advantage is that you can subscribe to the friendfeed rss and will be notified whenever I post anything on any of my disparate sites. It's one of the more useful Web 2.0 sites out there but the remains one question: What if it's too much of information? Who knows. I say indulge your inner voyeur and subscribe today!

The feed: http://friendfeed.com/rax262?format=atom

The Joomla 1.5 migration has been going, albeit slowly. Over the past month I've attempted to port my current template but in the end this has turned out to be too difficult for a number of reasons. Today I move several of the frontpage articles over to the new platform and noticed that embedding Flash videos is broken or not working. So I'm staying put for the time being

Yes, this means that comments are still broken. However, I've made a few changes to the tumble log and twitter accounts. As I mentioned earlier I'm looking for a way to integration all of the social media elements into a more complete package. I have have the tumble log located at http://tumblr.infomountain.org. Tumblr is also now attached to the twitter account and will, allegedly, push content between the two. Check it out, and if you want to post comments just send me a tweet or tumble.