The World Wide Inter-web

This week I made a discovery -- RSS feeds. For those of you who have been going about your daily lives in the dark as I have, Wikipedia describes RSS feeds as something to "benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place." And if it comes from Wikipedia, it MUST be true. If I had to describe them, I would say they're basically headlines from your favorite websites that allow you to get a brief glimpse of a lot of information all at once, without having to click on different pages. Although I heard of them before this week, I never really looked into how they work or how they could benefit me until now.

My discovery came about because of a conversation I had with my boss. I've been working on a project in Deloitte consulting for the last 2 months where I'm in charge of data analysis for something called the "Shift Index". It's been eye-opening working on this project and seeing how technology has dramatically altered the world we live in, and in particular the environment where U.S. businesses operate. Feel free to read the Executive Summary of the report to get a better understanding.

Anyway, back to my boss. He always seems to know everything about what's going on in the world, especially with regards to technology. He manages to do this while balancing all his other numerous and time consuming responsibilities, which, frankly, are more demanding and more time consuming than my own. I asked him how he was able to accomplish this, and part of his answer was these RSS feeds. So, if you feel overwhelmed by the amount of content out there on the internet every day and you'd like to stay current on any and all topics, I highly recommend reading up on this and getting started. Google makes it REALLY easy to get set up with their free, web-access Google Reader program. Firefox even lets you combine Google Reader with Gmail to get all your news and emails in one convenient location.

My life is forever changed.

Speaking of life changing events, I saw this video below this week and loved it. Just in time for Halloween! Pretty sure at 0:17 the guy on the right wanted a high-five... Awkward...