I am rehash­ing this post I made sev­eral months back because I think it is good to read it again (for peo­ple who have read it); in any case, it is good to high­light this now, spe­cially after I gave a retreat to col­lege stu­dents around three weeks ago. The last time I directed a silent retreat was three years ago. It was great to have joined that crack group of Jesuits and lay peo­ple who did one-on-one spir­i­tual direc­tion to stu­dents for five days! I directed some col­lege seniors who were about to spend their last semes­ter of col­lege and enter into a dif­fer­ent world. This post is ded­i­cated to them.

You know my stand on this. I think Steve Jobs has to be one of the best pre­sen­ters in the world. His speeches are great not because he is a great speaker (which he is), but because he makes great use of the tech­nol­ogy that he has avail­able to his advan­tage. He is prob­a­bly the world’s best sales­man today.

For some strange rea­son, peo­ple seem to be look­ing for jobs nowa­days. Maybe the eco­nomic inse­cu­rity is forc­ing peo­ple to look for greener pas­tures, or maybe the younger gen­er­a­tion has a cer­tain thresh­old for hold­ing on to jobs, but I’ve heard of sev­eral peo­ple look­ing for work, sub­mit­ting their resume for con­sid­er­a­tion or get­ting job inter­views in other com­pa­nies, and even send­ing their resumes to me for con­sid­er­a­tion in our company.

Read­abil­ity is a project by Arc90 Lab. It is a very sim­ple but effec­tive tool that removes the clut­ter from web­sites and makes you go straight to read­ing the arti­cle you want to read. It removes pho­tos, columns, flash videos, and with genius nifty cod­ing, con­verts the page you are read­ing into some­thing more read­able and beautiful.

With all the noise from the Inter­net, our com­put­ers and our envi­ron­ment, it is dif­fi­cult to focus even for 10 min­utes straight. I’ve started using the Pomodoro Tech­nique and it has helped me tremen­dously, but there are still a lot of dis­trac­tions, mostly com­ing from tech­nol­ogy itself. Tech­nol­ogy (and the inter­net) is the bane and boon of humanity.