Man I love the Internet. It has everything you ever wanted to know. It also has thousands of things you really don't want to know.
I'm one of those odd people who loved school. From kindergarten through college and beyond tell me something I didn't know and I'm fascinated. You can even pick subjects I don't care about, and I'll try to absorb everything and ask for more.
Thirty years ago, you would find people like me trolling through libraries with my nose in the
card catalog. I'd have mapped out every new and used bookstore in town. I'd even plan my vacations around discovering new bookstores in other towns. Today, I can sit anywhere in my house, library, coffee shop and mall and surf the web.
Unlike the people of yore, I have the Internet at my fingertips. But I find hyperlinks are both a blessing and a curse. They make finding new information very easy. But like any drug, it's a hard habit to break.
The Online Pack Rat
If you were to visit my house you'd find my office is very neat and tidy. Everything is in its place. My books, CDs, records (yes I still have vinyl) and movies are all stacked on shelves in the correct order.
But if you were to look at my computer, it's a different story. My desktop is a jumble of files, documents and shortcuts in no particular order. Heck, I still have shortcuts for programs I uninstalled months ago.
The real mess is on the shelf. I have four external hard-drives filled with more than five terabytes of music, movies, book and miscellaneous. Mostly miscellaneous. The last time I counted, I had seven different folders labeled "Stuff", three labeled "Save this" and countless ones named "New Folder" when I couldn't be bothered to even type in a name. All are stuffed to the brim with anything and everything I can find online. And I'll get to them someday, I hope.
My web browser is just as bad. I bookmark everything. News sites I like to visit every day are listed along sites for
Japanese cookware that I found online a year ago.
A Solution
I found my salvation. I just downloaded a custom toolbar from one of the companies I work with. They created the toolbar from
Zugo Bing. It attached right onto my Mozilla Firefox browser (it also works with Microsoft IE). Instead of having to scroll through tons of links to find my favorite search engine, Bing, or track down my weather and news page, they are all right there as a single click link. There are also links to my favorite sites like Twitter, Amazon and eBay.
Zugo allows any company to create their own customized and branded toolbar and start page. Because it helped me clean my browser, I cleaned my desktop as well. Now on to the hard drives. Wish me luck.
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