Sketchy Ideas

At first, I want to write ‘How Do I Keep Myself Well Updated Despite The Fact That I Live Twelve Time Zones Away From Many Things That Are Dear To Me Without Wasting Too Much Time and Being Perceived as Stalker’. However, two years in Singapore Management University had taught me two important lessons (among many others):

1. keep it simple (read: do not bulls*it too much)
2. Stop at #1 and if possible, make it simpler

So there goes the wonderfully long title…

Back to the real business, a friend of mine asked me:

“Do you keep yourself updated of what happened here?” – NNs, quote has been heavily modified (read: sanitized)

Apparently that friend of mine was amazed at how I immediate know about series of earthquakes that jolt Indonesia, Singapore’s new buzzwordz thatz involvedz SHINGZ and BOOMZ and of course superb juicy stories about  XYZ’s new relationship status and even more juicier stories about XYZ’s newer relationship status ;p

In short, I got plenty of ways to keep connected without actually spending too much time yet people still label me as stalker – especially when they could not comprehend how to do what I have done. Drats… I will discuss them later somehow but for this post, let’s keep it simple (read: I don’t have much time).

One of my favorite ways is Twitter.

To the uninitiated, Twitter is a digg-like site powered mostly by clueless individuals… millions of them who desperately want to share their 140 characters worth of wisdom.

(I really have something to do at 0246 in the morning so…)

This is how I use twitter.

How Do I Keep Myself Updated

Basically I only observe four columns

1. My friends
2. Anything that mentions my name
3. Anything that mentions “Indonesia”
4. Anything that mentions “Singapore”

From those four columns and occasional cursory checking, I could gather pretty much stuff that I want to know. Coupled with a bit of background knowledge and some sort of farfetch reasoning and rather flawed analytical skills, I could pretty much gather a lot of data to start a rather meaningful conversations*. Of course some discretion is needed to prevent me from reaching ‘creepy’ zone.

*ps: the one that does not involved “How are you?” and “How’s the weather there?”

How do you keep yourself updated?