Why I love the Internet, part 2

I’ve been trying to get more organized recently (a quest that I imagine will continue for eternity without ever really being fulfilled), and simple things like an online to-do list are incredibly helpful, especially since I can apparently add things to it from my phone.  That help’s me circumvent Sean’s Third Rule of Irony, which states that I will never think of things I need to do when I’m in a position to do them or write them down so I’ll remember later.  Now I can add things to my to-do list anytime, from anywhere!  Take that, universe!

In fact, universal access and cross-integration have to be one of the coolest parts about the internet, and they're becoming more and more common.  I used to think Windows Live was lame.  Come to find out that they’ve now integrated Facebook status updates and chat into Messenger, included blog-editing software, and added a service that let’s you sync folders to the internet (so your documents are simultaneously backed-up and accessible from anywhere).  No more emailing things to myself!

While being able to organize my life a little better is certainly a nice side-benefit, it has occurred to me that the primary benefit from all of this is that I get to feel cool and tech-savvy until the newness wears off.  And fortunately, there’s enough new internet stuff coming out all the time that we can all feel cool and tech-savvy all the time.

Go technology!

Why I love the Internet, part 1

Whoever came up with the idea to have blogging websites track statistics on how many people were viewing their blog was a genius. I realize I’m easily amused, but there’s a certain part of me that gets all giddy watching the pageviews on this blog slowly (um, very slowly) go up, and seeing that a few of the people looking at my pitiful blog are doing so from cool places like Germany, Russia, Uganda, and the Netherlands.

Granted, those are all are friends that happen to live in those respective places at the moment, but it highlights just how great the internet really is. See, in order to make a series of vain writings about myself and my personal thoughts on the world 100 years ago, I would have had to collect peoples’ addresses, buy a ton of stamps and envelopes, and write out (or type on a typewriter) the same message ad nauseum to send it out to all of my friends. They would have gotten there in a couple weeks, and most of them probably wouldn’t have been very happy to get a letter with that kind of stuff instead of a personal letter anyways.

But now, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I can do all of that in about no time at all, and my friends on the other side of the world can read it in a matter of seconds. Awesome? Absolutely.

Besides, the internet has a way of making mundane things interesting. If you’re reading this, chances are that you’ve spent more time than you’d like to admit reading Wikipedia articles and opening all the links to stuff you don’t understand.

I, for one, have never found myself on Wikipedia at 2am with 20 tabs of varying astronomy and physics articles waiting to be read in the background. Never…

Procrastination at its finest

It was inevitable.

I’ve been wanting to start a blog for a while now (ever since I learned that people I know have blogs, and that some of them are actually pretty entertaining). True to my nature, though, I kept putting it off and saying, “Oh, maybe someday.” So why did I break with tradition and an impeccable record of procrastination and suddenly decide to actually make it happen?

Ha. Because I’m actually procrastinating something else in the process.

I love when procrastination gets you to stop procrastinating. Faced with the choice of starting the 7 page paper that’s due on Tuesday or fulfilling my lifelong dream of starting a blog, the choice was easy. Okay, so maybe “lifelong dream” is a bit of an exaggeration. And I suppose going to bed at a decent hour was also an option. But still, can you blame me?

So, I am happy to announce that I will be procrastinating many future assignments by posting to this blog, and in the process I’ll be helping you, my friends, procrastinate your assignments by reading these posts!

You gotta love multi-tasking.

So, welcome. I hope you all enjoy reading this stuff as much as I enjoy writing it. And in case you were wondering, the blog’s title is funny if you know Russian.

If you don’t... well, pancake.