Well its been a while since I’ve posted here, life has been a little crazy lately. I’ve just started a new job, and I’m three days out from my very first triathlon. With all of this exciting/stressful stuff going on however, my whole “personal challenge” a month idea has kind of gone down the drain. Now that things are getting back on track, I’m starting up again with one that I have wanted to do since I started: no TV for a month. Pretty simple, no TV, Netflix, movies, video games, etc. for a month. Since I am trying to get caught up with life I thought this might help me, TV is definitely my biggest distraction from getting things done around my apartment.
April is a really busy month for me, so I decided to take it a little bit easier on myself with the challenge. This month I want to completely go through and clean/organize everything in my apartment – every drawer, closet, and pile of crap sitting on the floor. I have a friend moving, and that reminded me of just how much crap can accumulate in an apartment when you live there for a while. Since there is a good chance I won’t be in this apartment for too much longer, I decided its better to just do it now. While some of you may assume this to be nearly impossible, the truth is that I have been working on getting rid of stuff and generally reorganizing myself for a while, and this will just be a final push to finish everything. It certainly will take some time, but since I have a whole month to do it it shouldn’t be too bad.
Disappointed, that’s how I would describe my March reading results. I really thought this month would be the first month I actually completed my goal, instead of just getting close. Unfortunately, a vacation, a 63 hour work week, and a week and a half of being sick conspired to give me one great excuse for why I didn’t read all that I wanted to this month. I read four books, so about one a week. a lot more than I normally would, but still under half of what I planned.
I was browsing the web today and came across this article: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0328/billionaires-11-profile-yuri-milner-billionaire-friended-web.html. It looked interesting and I wasn’t sure who Yuri Milner was so I thought I would check it out. Once I got to the page though, I was so confused by Forbes layout, that I never got to actually reading the article. By far the most overwhelming thing on the page was an ad about investment mistakes. WTF? I came to learn about Yuri Milner, not my own lack of investment prowess. I then looked around and realized something: the vast majority of the page wasn’t actual content. I was curious so I fired up Photoshop and broke down the different sections (White Space, navigation, Content, Ads) of the first screen of the website, (no scrolling aka “above the fold”) by width and height. Then, brushing off my basic geometry skills, got the pixel area of the different sections and compared them to the total pixel area of the page.
Here are the results:
Navigation: 15%
White Space: 27%
Content: 18%
Advertisement: 40%
No, you didn’t read that wrong. Advertisement took up over twice as much space on the first screen of the article than the content. Maybe that’s why the article had to be six pages long.
Just another example of print media just not getting the web, and page design being driven by a bottom line.
This month I wanted to focus on something other than a physical activity, so I decided to focus on reading more. As a goal I am going to read ten books this month. Since my new year resolution last year, I have been reading more., but lately it has slacked off a little. I also just recently read the first “fun” book in a while (Inside Delta Force – good read) and it made me realize how long it has been since I have read anything other than a technical or business book. Ten books a month is about one every three days, which might be pushing it, but I think is still realistic (I’m a fast reader). I’m looking for good books (particularly “fun” reads) so if you have any, let me know in the comments.
