Charloween

I joined 750words.com last week, and I'm enjoying it.

It's like a giant Twitter text box that keeps a running word count but doesn't share your words anywhere and also keeps some neat stats* and gives you badges for stuff. So, not at all like Twitter. But found it via qui_oui's Twitter feed, so I can be forgiven? (Plus, the site has a combo birds-and-bowling scoring-and-badges thing that I'm enjoying, so tweets maybe aren't that far off? Yeah. /overthinking) Anyway - I like that there's a running word count displayed for me so I don't use checking the word count as a distraction.

*Time-to-completion, wpm, how many times you were distracted, etc.

I've got 6 days in a row now of making it to 750 words, and while not all of it is brilliant, it's 6 x 750 words typed out that I probably wouldn't have typed. I used it to bash out some thoughts and plans in prep for yesterday's So-What-Are-Your-Research-Questions? meeting with my interim supervisor. I used it to go through some possible responses to questions in my rapidly-approaching job interview (in ~2.5 hours? - for an hourly-paid and supervisory job at the place where I've been volunteering). I haven't used it to write an entry for here, but I suppose that's not far off.

(Yesterday I mused about a Mythbusters versus Top Gear crossover, but decided that would be a Very Bad Idea since one show is people being perky about science and the other is people being grumpy about cars.)

Since the site keeps stats, I could see that over the last five days I've had the window open for hours in the background while I'm noodling off somewhere else. Today I decided that I'd try tossing words in all at once - and was able to get up to my limit (while muddling through some theoretical stuff for my thesis) in 18 minutes.

18 minutes to type 750 coherent words? Put that way, it hardly seems a chore at all. Wish me luck for tomorrow!

Selleck Waterfall Sandwich.

...yes.

I think google may have created the best tool to access the internet. In their feed reader, they have this section of add-ons and goodies. In there, you can find this whatsit bookmark that's just called "Next >>". It's a bookmark to add to your bookmark toolbar. When clicked, it'll bring you to the page that's the next newest unread item in your subscribed feeds.

What makes this awesome (aside from the obvious - not having to access the Reader app in order to access your feeds) is in the effect of clicking this one thing and being taken to site after site of fresh content.

Essentially, you just click the thing and it makes more internet.

Or appears to. But that's really the same thing, eh? You don't have to hunt down the content, you have one button (now renamed "MOAR!") that brings it to you whenever you click there. And then suddenly: more internet. Like magic.

And the fun part is it's arranged with the newest item first and not grouped by blog/site so you never know what you're going to get. I just clicked from the Google Reader to a new fic from sam_storyteller to an article at The New York Review of Books to news of a Chinese mine collapse. All with the one button!

Without having to go through your bookmarks or URL history or the Reader (or flist, if you've set it up). You click the thing and it makes more internet.


EDIT: the song to match this... *thumbs through mp3s* How about The Feeling, with "I Thought It Was Over"? I’m spinning in circles I can’t stop/ I thought it was over but it’s not.

At work today I was asked to dig up an old page from our site (I failed - it SO does not exist, and I doubt it ever did, photographic proof to the contrary) but then I got distracted. One York page had a link labeled "Internet". Click that, and you get the whole internet. (It was a page of links to search engines... and google didn't exist yet.)

Sure, university websites from 10 years ago are hilarious. Even more hilarious are government sites. Check this out. The Government of Canada had something called GIFT... "The Government Information Finder Technology (GIFT) is an infrastructure that delivers a search and retrieval capability to Government data and information in its original format over different government sites and locations."

Also precious is the text from the government's main page: "Government of Canada Primary Internet Site (Canada Site) is the Internet electronic access point through which Internet users around the world can obtain information about Canada, its government and its services. Direct links are also provided from this site to government departments and agencies that have Internet facilities."

Oh, 1997. *pats 1997* Back when you were so starved for content you actually put in paragraphs about what the internet was?