Incredible ways to waste time

As I have mentioned before, at my job I have a lot of cases where I have to wait on my computer. Usually this is performing a compile and link operation, which can take from one to five minutes; sometimes even a bit longer.

You can't really do much other work while this is happening. Sure, you can check you email, if there is something new to review, but most of the time you are just waiting. In a minute or two, you can't really work on another project, the mental shift of trying to go from one to the other usually just doesn't work.

I've tried various one minute time killer strategies, like YouTube or browsing bookmarked websites, but I have now discovered the two greatest time-killers ever created for the Internet.

And, no real surprise, they both come from Google.

I know, maybe I'm just a little bit late to catch onto these things, but I have to say both of these products are able to transform the online experience. The first is 'Google Reader'. Google Reader is 'simply' a newsreader. I put the word 'simply' in quotes because it is an absolutely amazing piece of software. The interface is easy to use, the visual presentation is amazing and, most importantly, it is not located on your own machine. You can go to any computer, anywhere, and log into 'Google Reader' and everything is exactly as you left it. Since all of your reading status is stored as part of your Google account you can start reading some content at one machine and, later, pick up right where you left off on another. Without installing any applications at all.

Google Reader is really king of a transformational way in which you interact with the web. Instead of you 'going' to a bunch of websites, instead the websites all come to you! The interface is so well designed it feels as if you have 'email for the web'. All of the sites you could possibly be interested in are filtered into folders that you can access in a smooth and easy way.

The next big time-waster I just discovered is 'play.blogger.com' . As you know, I like to post photographs on my blog. Well, it turns out I am most certainly not the only one!

I have tried using Google Images in the past, but it is like trying to sift through a mountain of crap. However, with 'play.blogger.com' you get an entirely different experience. People who are posting photographs on their blog have an investment in their content. The photographs usually represent their 'best ones' and have quite often are ones they felt had a some artistic merit.

Play.blogger.com provides an interactive slide show of all of the photographs posted on blogger, in order of the most recent. The raw quantity of photographs is incredible. Once again the interface to the software is excellent and easy to use. It allows you to rapidly scan hundreds of photographs in a short period of time. Whenever one catches your eye, you can click on it and immediately go that that person's blog. As you are browsing the photographs you can have it present profile information about the author as well.

What you find is that only a fraction of the photographs come from the United States. This makes the images particularly interesting because they show exotic locations and people from different cultures of the world.

In a very short period of time I came across dozens of amazing images that I found very striking.

If you have two minutes to kill I can't recommend a better way to waste it. Here are a sampling of just some of the photographs I found in a quick review.