The importance of being serendipitous
Ok, ok, I know it seems just an excuse for the delay in my weekly post, however:
- I was writing a beautiful post on Javascript scrapers and bookmarklets, when I started doing some experiments on a facebook page (you'll see more in the next post...)
- on facebook I saw some updates from friends, crossposted from twitter, that reminded me that I had to check recent twits
- after a while watching twits, I decided to check the list of people that few selected friends of mine were following (which is a good way to increase the possibility to find something interesting), so I stumbled onto Silvia's twits and found her recent interview online (btw Silvia, that's cool... congrats!)
- at the end of the interview, I saw that it was originally appearing on Issue 45 of fullcircle magazine so I went to check it - I opened the pdf file as I thought that the "top 5 music notation apps" article might have been interesting for a friend of mine
- at page 5 my attention was attracted by an article about Conky... wait... What is that? Just a matter of minutes: google search, official website, screenshots, aptitude install...
Now I have a beautiful conky panel on my desktop (and yes, I have also solved the conky disappears issue... thanks Google!), I have discovered an ezine I did not know and a twitter account I was not following. And the best thing is that these streams of consciousness happen pretty often in my life: I still remember how I discovered the existence of The Time Traveler's Wife by reading the blog of the wife of a researcher who was publishing stuff I was interested in. Sometimes instead I just happen to find stuff without exactly remembering how I got to it, such as with Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.
I kind of like my serendipitous attitude, as most of the times the things I find are actually interesting... But that kind of scares my friends when I tell them about the stuff I find. :) It is hard to make them understand that I was not searching for it, but rather it found me, and that it is not an attention problem: I can stay concentrated when I need it, but when I leave my mind open to serendipity these things just happen very easily.
Btw, the Javascript article is coming soon... sorry for making you wait ;)
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