Cat Killers
January 21st, 2008 | by Mitchell Allen |
Animated GIF by joeltelling
Curiosity Killed the Cat . . .
What if you clicked on links without care?
Eventually, you’ll click on a semi-relevant link that will make you forget what you are supposed to be doing.
It’s not exactly mindless surfing, as you had set out to accomplish a task online.
As you digress farther afield, both time and purpose seem to flee.
Before you know it, another day has slipped away.
Let me share these examples of veni vidi ergo tempus fugit:
I was looking for public domain ebooks for a top-secret personal project.
My quest took me to Project Gutenberg
After finding what I needed, I should have returned to the regularly scheduled php program.
But, noooo. I had to “verify” that my rare find was indeed public domain.
So I clicked the link to the Main Page and scrolled down to the sitemap.
HA-HA! Here’s the goods:
Gutenberg: No Cost or Freedom? what does free ebook mean?
Clicking this link yielded some dry, but useful information about free.
Half-way down this page, I saw an interesting link to click:
Here are some real world examples of what people did with Project Gutenberg ebooks.
And this, finally, led to the cat-killing What you cannot do.
Nice sculptures, eh?
. . .Satisfaction Brought it Back
The one good thing about hitting the cyber wall is that you get your senses knocked back into you.
After staring at the incongruous image of a desecrated tome, I blinked a couple of times and went back to work.
Hairball Agonies and Horrible Acronyms
This second example is more insidious. Random clicking and daydreaming lead to moments of unbridled stream-of-consciousness.
If you’re like me, you see messages in tea leaves and blog posts in every Google page.
I was searching for a WordPress editor replacement and noticed many references to TinyMCE.
I wondered, idly, how many people pronounce it like I do, “Tiny Mice”.
So, I Googled “tiny mice” +editor. Clever, eh?
Look what came back!
Oh, hell naw!
All thoughts of research forgotten, I proceeded to create this post.
For the sensibilities of my readers, I had to get to the bottom of this.
And I did.
Frederico Caldeira Knabben is the author of the FCKeditor, an open source text editor for the Internet.
Alriighty, then.
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