January 4, 2009
Infoholicism
My name's Gerv... and I'm an infoholic.
Whenever I have a tangential thought, I feel an irrepressible urge to read about the topic, usually on Wikipedia. Who invented the AK-47? What happened to that hijacked oil tanker? Who operates an A380 between London and Sydney? And, of course, the reading doesn't stop when you answer the question. It's playing havoc with my ability to focus and concentrate on one thing for more than about 10 minutes, or to get my work done.
I keep 90-day browser history, and my history has 853 unique Wikipedia URLs in it after you remove searches. That's 9.47 Wikipedia pages a day, every day. Is anyone else willing to admit to a bigger problem than that?
(Procedure: in Firefox, open history sidebar using Ctrl-H, type "en.wikipedia.org" into the Search box, focus the results, press Ctrl-C, paste into a text editor which numbers lines, then remove all Special:Search URLs.)
Here are 12 of the most random Wikipedia pages I've felt the necessity to read in the last 90 days:
- Baby hatch
- Constitution of Maldives (edited)
- Corleone crime family
- Park Royal tube station
- Poxy Boggards
- Ralph Nader presidential campaign, 2008
- Source Input Format
- Steroid cycle
- The Pet Goat
- Tommy Chong
- Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer
- Zero-entry swimming pool
The first step to a solution is admitting that there's a problem... is there anyone else out there?
December 31, 2008
Walk, Don't Run...
...down to the Mozilla International Store, where the ultra-cool "Internet By The People, For The People" Mozilla Foundation t-shirts are now available to those outside the US at the somewhat odd price of £8.09. Presumably that's a conversion of $12.99 or something (or, the way our currency is going, a conversion of $5.50).
OK, so the cultural reference isn't as strong for us, but it's still a great slogan :-)
