I surf the web.
I surf the web a lot.
I spend way too many hours surfing the web, and there’s a lot of stuff to be found.
There is one major problem with the web: there’s just a lot of crap out there. But, in the other respect, there is also a lot of … well … non-crap. I wouldn’t call it good. I wouldn’t call it bad. I’ll just say that there’s a ton of pages out there that say things, do things or have things that are a little out of the ordinary.
So what do I do when I hear about these sites, or come across a link to one? I bookmark it. I’ll hit Control-D (Command-D on the Mac) to add it to my bookmark file, and then I may or may not ever go back and look at it. But I’ll feel confident knowing it’s there (as you’ll never know when you’ll need it).
I’ll accept it. I’m a pack rat.

Then I realized something: my bookmark list is getting quite large. What is all the junk that’s in there?
Like this link I recently got to a story about “Neo: A Matrix Musical,” a play at the Live Bait Theater in Chicago. Now, The Matrix is one of my favorite movies, and I don’t remember it remotely revolving much around music. Odd…
Then there was a site somebody sent me: Rotten.com. If you’re in the mood to have yourself pretty well disgusted and disturbed, check the site out. It’s got pictures of murder scenes, diseased patients and other, well, rotten stuff. It ranks right up there with other favorites like Gross.com and the stinky meat project.
By this point, you’ve probably all heard about the Napster vs. Metallica fiasco (read my previous column about it Click here for instructions on how to get back on. And if you want see a funny (albeit vulgar) parody of this whole situation, CampChaos.com has a great Flash animation that is really dang funny. Just don’t listen to it in a public lab without headphones, as somebody might get mad.
In the “I wish I was that cool” category, I came upon an interesting contest that reminds me of programming contests of yesteryear: The 5k contest. It’s a contest where the entrants have to design web pages that are less than five kilobytes in size – graphics, code, scripts and all. As a web designer, I know that it’s a tough task making a page that looks cool that is that small. My favorite is this site that provides a good chunk of interactivity, and very good use of small graphics. Pretty cool to me!
As some of you may or may not know, I’m a regular reader of Slashdot. I’m also a regular reader of Suck. So I thought it was really funny when I came across an old parody of Slashdot (a.k.a Suckdot) that Salon threw together in December. They changed Slashdot’s motto of “News for nerds, stuff that matters” to “Porn for Nerds. Stuff that Splatters.” They even took the time to create some fake links that went to the exact opposite kinds of sites that Slashdot would have. I thought it was funny, anyway.
Time is slowly winding down to the end of my tenure at the University of Oregon, and the topic recently came up in one of my classes about what kind of pranks could be expected. After all, campus pranks are a main stay on many campuses. I found a site that is dedicated to campus pranks. One of the most interesting (and cool) sites listed there was the site dedicated to MIT Hacks. And I must admit that some of the ideas I’ve heard pale in comparison to the ones that these guys have pulled off. For example, they’ve turned a large dome on one of the campus buildings into a replica of Star Wars’ R2-D2 droid, a giant pumpkin and a parking spot for a police cruiser.
Sometimes I wonder where these people find the kind of time to pull this stuff off. I know I could never do this. I’ll just go back to my rat hole, and go play Tetris, instead.