I give up.
It's a public holiday. The sun is shining outside. And I'm working. Or rather, I'm not working. Allow me to quickly explain that statement before scotsman.com's HR department decide to downsize me and replace me with a ZX-81 and a begonia.
I have
spent the morning poring over the world's dullest contract, hunting for lacunae. Don't get me wrong, that really was work and it felt like it. A few other mildly interesting tasks kept me occupied until it all went wrong. I tried to research this column.
Oh the humanity.
The problem - as ever - is my work PC,
the subject of other Lazy Guides and the reason I believe technology will kill us all.
To describe it as limited in its capabilities is like calling Jack the Ripper a cheeky scamp. If it was a toaster it would pop up chilled lard. It is, clearly, a glob of silicon vomit deposited on my desk by a devotee of some ancient, twisted god of incompetence.
It has no sound. It can sometimes handle Flash. Most video is beyond it. Firefox crashes frequently. The PC is protected by the opposite of a firewall. (An icewall?) It blocks useful and interesting sites yet allows my email to be flooded with filth that the Marquis de Sade would find a bit strong.
Here I am, the editor of one of Google News's top 25 news sites and I don't have a decent PC. We were the first UK newspaper site to offer video podcasting and I have to watch this from home. We're about to launch more truly gripping podcasts and I can't listen to them at work. It's been like this for more than six months.
It beggars belief.
And trying to write a column about groovy things on the web when you yourself cannot access groovy things on the web is something of a challenge.
All of which is a pity as I have started making user of a great tool for finding groovy things.
StumbleUpon enables you to hunt for websites that have been recommended by others. I was about to throw a whole bunch of jargon, like "Web 2.0", "social networking" and "tagging" at you there but have restrained myself. It describes itself like this:
StumbleUpon is an intelligent browsing tool for sharing and discovering great websites. As you click Stumble!, you'll get high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended (rated I like it) by friends and other SU members with similar interests. Rating these sites shares them with your friends and peers - you will automatically 'stumble upon' each others favorites sites.If you're using Firefox (and you should be) StumbleUpon appears as a toolbar on the browser. When you see a site you think is good, you click an "I like this" button, add a one-word label called a tag. Others can the access that site when they "stumble" on the relevant tag. Similarly, you can search the web using these tags (or free text) to find sites you'll like. Because it uses human recommendations, StumbleUpon will filter out most of the crud that search engines throw your way.
It's great. In fact, it's like rediscovering web surfing.
While playing with the tool, I came across a
Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. Calvin is sitting in a classroom when he suddenly screams: "What on earth am I doing in here on this beautiful day?! This is the only life I've got," which brings us nicely back to the beginning of this article….
