The sample chapter I’m writing this week is I sat down to check my email, and woke up watching kitten videos: Internet addiction time warps.

I’d love to hear your stories of your worst web time warps, and why you think the internet has the ability to suck your time out of your hands until you find yourself at 4am thinking “Wait, is it Tuesday? Where have I been?”

Oh, man. The biggest time sucks I’ve ever had consist of YouTube clips of “So You Think You Can Dance.”

That’s right, the campy dance version of FOX’s American Idol. That in itself is only slightly humiliating, but combined with the power of YouTube has single-handedly brought down hours of sleep and/or productivity. What? Through the power of Wikipedia, I’ve learned that Greece, Australia and Germany have their own version of the show? Well, I HAVE to watch ALL of the performances. ALL OF THEM. I mean, they’re only two minutes.

And that’s where the time suck comes, I suppose. You’re watching two minute performances, but you’re watching DOZENS AND DOZENS of two minute performances. Same goes for Wikipedia. It only takes a minute or two to scan an article, but then you see a link and it’s so EASY to click on it and learn more information about reality shows in Germany and/or Austria, that you glance at the clock and it’s already three in the morning.

Watching thirteen year old girls fight on YouTube come in at a close second.

(I’ll let you know that I just spent the past hour looking at MORE SYTYCD videos. And I think it may be time for me to start going unwired as well.)

Like the other ten million people out there, I play World of Warcraft. It’s a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG for short; I go online and I can fight monsters or other players from around the world. But today, a new MMORPG has entered a private invitation-only phase that could possibly bring Blizzard to it’s murloc-killing, PVP-flagged, epic-wearing knees:

HELLO KITTY ONLINE.

Why yes, the makers of Hello Kitty is entering the MMORPG realm, specifically “Targeting female players from their pre-teens to twenties.” AND ME.

Efren: but what the hell would hello kitty fight? bad badtz maru gone awry?
Ernie: hahahaha… bad bad bad badzmaru
Ernie: or maybe hello kitties evil twin sister, born on the ninth plane of hell
Efren: oh god…like those bad hello kitties you see now with the skulls and stuff?
Ernie: Exactly.

The thought of using two flaming swords to topple a 100-foot demon Pochacco and three Kero kero keroppi spawns somehow fills me with glee. Okay, it probably won’t be that as much as it will be a way to customize the fabulous outfit that you’re wearing, but a boy can dream.

Since I’m fairly new to the world of Mac, I got to participate in my first video iChat ever this week. This ruled, because while I can officially say it was done to facilitate the need for face-to-face communication while working remotely, it was really just an excuse to play to my inner camgirl.

One thing I didn’t realize is how distracted I would be that my own image was in a corner — not so much because of vanity as much as it is being self-conscious. Does my face really look like that? Goddammit, am I gaining weight again? So while my co-workers are talking about deadlines and priorities, I’m trying ever-so-quietly to turn the laptop so it shows the side where I have the least amount of chins. I’m sure the novelty will wear off and I’ll get over it; that, or I’ll buy a backdrop.

(And yes, you might be interested to know that this is exactly how we look during development meetings. We’re a wacky bunch.)

On Monday, my new MacBook came. It’s funny – I’ve had a computer in one form or another for over the past twenty years, and this is the first Mac I’ve ever owned. Not that I’m an anti-Mac zealot; I know my way around PC, and why change what you already know? But I decided to get a Mac for the following reasons:

1. You could dual boot Windows on a Mac, which is necessary for cross-browser web page testing
2. I heard that World of Warcraft runs just fine on one of these things, and
3. Society tells me that only hip people use a Mac, and sweet baby Jesus, I SO want to be part of the fold. (Seriously, you can’t walk into a cafe in San Francisco without seeing a hipster on a Mac. All I need is a nose ring and a heroin addiction and I’m set.)

Now that I’ve had the MacBook for a couple of days, here are some thoughts:

• No surprise, the MacBook is pretty and shiny and white. But as an iPod owner, I know that if you so much as blow the back of an iPod, it will scratch. For this reason, I’m completely terrified of actually using the laptop for fear of wear and tear. Then I realize that my parents were the type of people to cover their furniture with a plastic tarp, and I weep for my carefree youth.
• Not having a Delete key freaks me out. Okay, Macs do have a Delete key, but it really functions as the Backspace key, so it’s not really a Delete key as it is a Delete Key FULL OF LIES. It’s kinda jarring the first couple of times, I’m just saying.
• Ditto with the one-button mouse thing. If it weren’t for my buddy Ben (who also hooked me up with the discount by the way, Gay Apple Mafia in full effect) who taught me the two-fingers-on-the-trackpad-and-click thing, my left hand would have cramped up from doing Control+Click so many times.
• Connecting to a wireless connection is a MILLION times easier. That’s nice.

More thoughts as they come along, but yeah. The MacBook seems pretty solid. I’ll keep this around for a little while.

I’m not sure how I feel about this; I see Middle America being all “WTF” and clicking on the link out of curiosity, and then surprise! They just gamed the system. And people using social media sites aren’t necessarily the prime users of The Amazing Race. This could backfire, pretty badly.

That being said, I’ll totally watch this just to see the midget bicker with the two beauty queens somewhere in Antarctica.

True story – A couple months ago, after another long night at work, I got pulled over by the CHP doing 75 on the freeway. “You’re up pretty late,” he said. “What were you doing tonight?”

“Coding,” I replied, as I handed him my license and registration.

He looked startled for a second. “Coding?”

“Yeah, coding.” Another pause. “I’m a computer programmer.” I began to wiggle my fingers for him, like I was typing a giant imaginary keyboard. My parents would make the same motion bragging to their friends that their son played the piano – Oh, our son has played for thirteen years! He’s like Mozart, they would say. Commence finger wiggling.

Oh. The policeman rolled his eyes as he walked back to the patrol car to relay my information. “Coding.” It was only after I drove off with a warning that I realized that the policeman didn’t think I was coding, but I was on codeine.

I’ve been doing a lot more coding lately, both in and out of work. You still won’t see write a lot about technical matters on this weblog, though. I figure that while I’m… hmm… adequate at programming, I have no right to write about it – there are thousands of other techie geeks, writing about standards and code practices and detailed how-to articles that everyone else can read and learn from. Me, I’m good at writing about how the lady at Chaat Cafe can’t get my name right.

That being said, I’ve been playing around with both PHP and DOM-based Javascript a bit more lately. The tool tips on the right hand side, for example – if you’re using Firefox, you’ll notice that the catty mouseover comments I wrote for each link had previously cut off after a certain amount of characters. I could have gone into my mini-blog weblog templates and changed the structure of how I wanted things to display, but that would have seemed like a giant overhaul. Could I do something where all I had to do was to insert a JS file and the title descriptions would automatically display? Turns out I could, thanks to the Document Object Model.

It helped that I had some old code to work from. A year ago I had written up this half-assed article on Help Tips. The plan was to show everyone how r0×0r I was at web development during my Yahoo! interview, with mixed success. After a little bit of tweaking, the code I use to enable tool tips is here.

The onload=init statement means that the init function kicks in once the document loads, and does two things: dynamically creates an empty tool tip, and collects all the a tags in the mini-blog section, where the id is set to textcontent1. The elements are stored into objTag, where mouse handlers are applied depending on whether you’ve hovered over the link or not. (It should be said that I had some help on positioning the tool tip from a similar project at WebFX. Why recreate the wheel, right?)

It shouldn’t be that difficult to implement on your pages either, provided that you have a little bit of experience with DOM. All you’d have to do is make sure that objTags is pulling the correct links and make sure you a CSS id of tooltip exists and you should be alright.

(My next post will be zanier, I promise)

just popped over to your portfolio site (since i’d never looked at it). the link for deluxetrader[.com, a former client site I had done work with at marchFIRST] now redirects to… well… masterbates.com.

it’s funny if you’re familiar with web culture (two clicks away from porn!!!!), probably fairly upsetting if you’re not.

the tagline is: “No Popups or Blind Links, Just Quality Porn for the Lazy Surfer”

as a concept, i can get behind that.

Oh my God. I think Patrick just saved me from a possibly humiliating moment with a future employer.

S: So how’s the job hunt going?
E: It’s not. I mean, I’m looking, but there’s not a lot of demand right now. How bout you?
S: Eh. It’s been better. I have some interviews for some HR and Office manager positions. Oh yeah, and there’s the job to be Steve Jobs’ Executive Assistant. But anyway, there’s an Account Coordinator position and…
E: *spits out water* WHAT? Steve Jobs?! Noah Wyle Steve Jobs!?
S: Uh-huh. I don’t know, though. I want to get into Human Resources, though. I’m all about personal growth — you can’t learn much HR as an Exec Admin.
E: (dazed) It’s Steve Jobs.
S: But here’s the funny thing — I told the powers that be that my priorities were getting an HR position at Apple. So guess who leaves me a message on my cellphone? You guessed it. “Shannon, this is Steve. So I hear that I’m second in line for HR Positions here at Apple. Call me on the cell.” Heh.
E: (dazed) It’s Steve Jobs. And you have his cellphone number. Shan… I think you win for the coolest party conversation starter. Ever.