Good enough or worse than not at all

I was reminded recently of an idea mentioned in an xkcd mouseover text: to keep yourself from being distracted by crap on the internet, put a 30-second delay before opening up a new webpage. I searched and someone had wroten a little script to do that.

I don't know if I screwed something up installing it or whatever, but the script appears to work erratically: sometimes correctly, sometimes showing a countdown on its icon but not obscuring the page, and sometimes having no effect at all.

The upshot being, the anti-distraction mechanism itself ends up replicating the "slot machine" sort of dynamic that makes things like web forums, Twitter feeds, and news sites so distracting in the first place. Being able to instantly check Reddit for new stories whenever you want is habit-forming, but only being able to do so 10% of the time is even worse!

Anyway, just found that amusing or whatever.

Weather 2.0?

Is there a clean, fast web site for checking weather forecasts?

It occurred to me a week or two ago that it's 2008, and there should be no reason to subject myself to the cluttered interface and animated banner ads of weather.com. I don't know of anything better, so I've switched to the government. It's actually not bad, functionality-wise, though it is still pretty unattractive. But at least they don't assault you with ads or distract you with golf conditions or whatnot.

Whoa

The indy media logo,

,

is rendered as "((( i )))" in the web page title when you go to the site.

I believe (i) was the emoticon we came up with as the counterpart to the ever-useful 8==D. Use it in a text message today!

:-P (i)

An Internet First?

Dave Neiwert uses the phrase "real ultimate power" with a straight face.

Search Engines Instead of Domain Names

Cam links to an article talking about people who don't even try guessing at domain names for things like corporate websites, and just use search engines to find what they're looking for.

It's interesting, this is actually how people were originally expected to access internet services: you'd look up what you were interested in in a directory service of some kind the same way you look up a phone number in the yellow pages. It was really the popularity explosion the internet went through, coupled with the incredible shittiness of search engine technology at the time, that made corporate vanity domain names necessary in the first place.