Lost Productivity of the 21st Century: Internet Vices

This week I'm participating in an all-week teaching workshop/class. Like most all-day professional development events, about two hours into the first day, I was feeling like I had voluntarily signed up - and paid - for Snoozefest 2k8. To top off the uncomfortableness of boredom, my stomach started fiercely growling at around 11:00 A.M. and continued to do so with high frequency until class let out at 5:00 P.M. Basically, I spent almost the entire day going between complete and utter boredom and my own fits of giggling that would ensue after my intestines would seemingly erupt and give birth to an alien child during a moment of quiet work time.

Luckily, since this professional development is technically a one-week, 50-hour course, we are allowed to bring our laptops to "take notes." What a big 21st century "PHEW!" Furthermore, after about a half hour of uninformed teacher anxiety on the first morning, the session leaders finally relieved the locked-up tension in the room and gave us the wireless guest log-in and password. Even though the boredom had hardly begun, when I was given that precious password, I felt like Mary must have felt upon learning the truth behind the immaculate conception. THANK GOD. No, seriously, thank you, God; you know how much I cannot live without the Internet. Anyway, upon being given access to the wireless highway of information, I proceeded to commence upon my normal daily Internet routine: Gmail, Washington Post, TNG, NY Times, [omitted for the purpose of maintaining dignity], our own Jenny Miller's other internet entertainment, and then music blog, music blog, music blog. Finally, my friend sitting next to me commented, "Wow, you check a lot of blogs."

Ah, caught in the act; lotion still on my hand. "Uh, yeah," I said, "I guess I do." I mean, mind you, the first part my routine is pretty quick - badda bing, badda boom - I've checked the news, my e-mail and the new stories up on TNG. The latter part, though, has become a time consuming, unstoppable, and greedy e-habit. Given the right time block or inability to fall asleep, I can spend more than an hour or two at a time hopping from music blog to music blog, gathering handfuls of songs along the way. It's so easy, and they all link to other music blogs.

You see, I love music blogs for multiple reasons. Firstly, I admire that the people who write them are so dedicated to finding cool tunes for all to enjoy. And second, they are easy to use, and once you find your favorites you are pretty much guaranteed a weekly supply of fresh songs to keep your gym trips from going stale. Be warned, however, that if and once you find your favorites, you will be unable to stop checking them on a daily, if not more frequent, basis.

My music blog obsession has been further fueled by my rather recent other obsession: The Hype Machine - a radio-ish site that pulls together a bunch of songs from music blogs all over the net. Although hypem.com can leave you listening to the occassional WTF song, and despite the fact that the "popular" section has been overrun by every remix of the summer, it's still worthy of your internet interest. Each song that has been conglomerated also has a link to the post from which it originally came; this feature has proven fatal to my productivity.

So, those are my internet "vices" - a whole slew of music blogs that I can't stop scavenging from, and hypem.com...and, oh, yes, the "omitted for dignity" for-shame blog (okay, it's bitchy gossip and might rhyme with Herez Pilton). Oh, right, I also read missed connections an embarrassing amount. While mindlessly perusing all these vice-sites, though, I often wonder what other people's internet obsessions/vices are. Which websites to do you and your refresh button single-handedly keep on the web? Which blogs sometimes get questionably more attention than your significant other? Most important, does anyone still use e-Bay?

Oh, and if you are feeling like it's time to pick up a new bad habit, try this site.