Back in stone age when most information available was actually printed on paper in forms of magazines and books , people experiencing the information overload invented techniques of speed reading to deal with it.

It worked - mostly.

Nowadays, we have most of the content coming to you through the browser window. Even if you can still speed read the web page, you can get even more speed advantage and quickly sort out the interesting content from the fluff by using the magic of news feeds, RSS, Atom and wonderful free tool Google Reader.

Rather that going to tens of favorites news web sites, blogs, etc you just subscribe to their feeds and the reader will show you whenever there is something new of interest. It also allows you to classify - tag the feeds and create groups, for example of Windows related blogs/news sites versus Apple related. It is completely up to you. You can also (as in Gmail) to "star" the favorite articles to keep them marked (or, to save a local copy in Google Notebook).

I have started to use the Reader again two weeks ago and never looked back. Now I have all my favorite feeds in one place and whenever I have some time (pretty rarely these days) I am trying to catch up. What I found very cool is bunch of tricks described in this lifehacler article.

My favorites are g+u keys as well as g+t/g+l keystrokes. Try them out.

And now for something completely different: tomorrow it will be 50 years from the death of the John von Neumann (or as he is known him in our geo-region - Neumann János (he was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary in 1903). A computer science pioneer and world class mathematician. If the computer science, mathematics, physics had their own Halls of Fame - similar as the Hockey Hall of Fame - he would have place in all of them.