MindMapping

There is a free software called FreeMind that allows you to start with a simple, central concept and drill further into each tangent that connects to the main concept. Here is an example of a map I am working on:












I began the map above yesterday; totally a rough beginning, but I imagine you can see what it means. It is a way to depict use case models, but is easier to use than Visio. Also, it is free! I've read about people using this kind of tool for personal growth and such, but I find that it lends itself perfectly to software development by allowing you to define the functional parts of the whole without knowing what the whole looks like. Nifty shit.

A point of interest regarding today's news media

I was watching Frontline the other day, and I saw this piece about modern news media, blogging, and how the internet is killing newspapers. It was part 3 of a series titled News War.
The points that I picked up on, some of which weren't really stated out loud, yet seemed fairly obvious to me were as follows (in no particular order):

• The bulk of all news being reported by all television, radio, and internet sources is coming from the so-called "news-wires" and newspapers.
• The news-wires and newspapers have to pay their reporters money for reporting.
• The news-wires and newspapers have to pay for production, delivery, administration, etc...
• Newspapers pay the news-wires for some of the news that the newspapers report.
  
• The internet is full of idiots such as myself, who can post on a blog (at no expense to myself) the very news that someone else worked to dig up, making this information freely available to anyone who reads the news on the site I post to.
  
• The shareholders of newspapers want profit margins to continue to increase.
• Which will win; quality of reporting or stockholders getting their profit margins to increase? Hmmm...
  
• The profit margins are decreasing because there are things like craigslist and eBay (to name only two such online services) which offer a better product than sifting through countless dead trees to find less information about what you are looking for.
• The reporters want to continue to make more money as the cost of living increases.
• The internet news groups succeed because they have almost no startup costs, and they don't need to pay reporters who are already being paid by the traditional news groups. Oh, and
• The internet news groups have no interest in changing their business models to facilitate paying for reporters, which would in turn affect their shareholders fortunes (if there are any shareholders).
• This is why we notice that most of what we see on television news is seeming more like grocery store tabloid material than what we might have grown up with. ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox alike are airing quasi soft-porn and the like to increase ratings so that shareholders see (...incessant) increases in profit margins.

It is the responsibility of the news media to deliver objective observations to the folks who need to know about what is going on in the world. It is my subjective (and readily acknowledged as shitty) opinion that Big News needs an overhaul.
Everyone wants to be rich. That is why capitalism is so ubiquitous in the world today. I guess, ultimately my point is, how rich is "rich enough"?

Golf is fun, and cigarettes are no more...

So Sunday I did something new. You guessed it: I played golf for the first time ever. I had such a good time, it boggles my mind that I hadn't tried it before. So no more cigarettes for me. I'm on day 3 with a patch. The patch seems to take the edge off of it, but not completely. I can see how weening myself off the patch would be effective. I now feel like I have been off for longer than a few days, and in a few weeks, with the lower-dosage patches, I should feel the same. Then, no patch and I should feel the same. Fucking cool.