Because What I Need are MORE Distractions

November 15, 2007

Leaving the office Tuesday night, I got caught in a discussion that started with how mortified my boss, Maiya, was that I linked to her site.

By the way, that’s her website listed under the section labeled “City of Newcastle”…riiiiight…THERE.

Are her pictures of Barley’s snow day are freaking adorable or what? He’s an awesome dog. Unbelievably sweet and good natured and ‘volunteers’ at all my events. What’s really awesome is, Maiya was going to get a cat and name it ‘Hops’. I forget why she didn’t get the cat, but I like to think that if she ever got a rabbit, she’d name it ‘Beer’.

After mentioning how much I liked her site and the cool little service that made it, the conversation quickly shifted to the ridiculous amount of blogs and online accounts I subscribe to, and ended with the observation that I might need to consider some sort of withdrawal program. Maybe. Just a tad.

As of this writing, I have no actual accounting of all the sites within the intersphere on which I have registered. Maybe it’s not such a great idea to broadcast that fact.

I would guess it’s somewhere around 200. It’s entirely possible it’s way, way worse than that.

A few years ago, I started a project to go through all my email accounts and use all the subscription notices, newsletters and service updates to record all the different sites I got junk from because I signed up for god-knows-what-free-thing. The list was gi-normous. I had to use Excel. I think I got about 85% done before being sucked into a fresh round of ‘oooh! Look at the cool thingy thing I can do here! I’ll totally use THIS.’

Thus the Rambling Map of Jules’ Distracted Interests and Intentions was forgotten. And now I can’t find it.

*Sigh*

I have four personal email accounts. One for family & friends. One for spam. One for business. One freebie from Yahoo.

I use eBay and Paypal and as of this Saturday, Craigslist. My favorite picture posting service is Flickr, but I have at least five others, including Shutterfly and Kodak and Moo and Imagekind…oh, and Yahoo and LiveSpaces, and possibly a few more. I thought about Smugmug for about 5 minutes, but decided I wasn’t that good. At least, not yet.

For my website and blog, I’ve got an account with Yahoo Small Business, Wordpress and Technorati. I also have an old Geocities account from before I sucked it up and paid for hosting service, which I kept because I figured I could always use it for testing. Then I have the statistics sites like Statcounter, Sitemeter, Google Analytics, and Feedburner. Because they all slice the pie chart a little different, and for some whacked out reason, that’s what I like about them.

Since I’ve got friends on other blog services, I use Typepad, Blogger and Myspace. Very infrequently. It’s just nice to know it’s there if I need it.

This summer I finally jumped on the social networking bandwagon with Linkdin, Myspace and Facebook, which opened my own personal pandora’s box along with them. As previously mentioned, I signed up with the eBay Blogs PBwiki. And that was cool. But then I joined the eBay Alumni Network, and I started finding eBay Peeps (ePeeps, for short) that I actually knew. Then I joined Facebook, and I found EVEN MORE! It was AWESOME! And addictive! I get it now! (It’s like High School. Only better, because I look WAY prettier now. And I’m popular! See? I have 21 friends. Obviously so much more important than substance.)

Yesterday, I don’t even know how I found it. But I came across PC Magazine’s 100 Favorite Blogs. And now I’m doomed. Because despite the fact that neither the Redhead Papers nor Dooce were listed, there are at least 20 new ‘must have’ blogs to add to my Netvibes feed reader. Because it’s really going to cut into my Yahoo! Mah Jong time if I have to read them all individually:

Cute Overlord – ok. ePeeps? There are LAMBS. (ePeeps + Lambs = BFD.) Non-ePeeps? Kittens. Puppies. Pants for eggs. You heard me.
Overheard in the Office - Loud female lawyer: “I’ll show you yours if you show me mine! Wait, the other way around…”
Parent Hacks – Yellow Pages Booster Seat. Hiding veggies in food. Painting swimsuits on naked dolls. All sorts of kid-neutralizing tips I’ll never get to use. Fun to imagine, though.
Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books – This just makes me think of my mom. Except for the bitches part. She and my aunt LOVE romance novels, and I can’t stand them. Because they don’t require brain power to read.
Starbucks Gossip – My love of caffeine is just like my love of online accounts. Totally out of proportion. Did you know Seattle and Dallas are #1 for the most & least caffeinated cities? Apt, I think.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs – Holy hell. I’d been hearing about Fake Steve Jobs for months now, but never looked him up. Was. Missing. Out.
Web Worker Daily – Gah. Too much to summarize. I’ll try this: telecommuter kernels of wisdom on things like: How to deal with web rage and rudeness. Timely.
Cocktailnerd – Nerd. Cocktail news. Does it get any better than this? I don’t think so.
Improv Everywhere – Maiya was just telling me about these folks. Staged an off the charts “Thomas Crown” incident in Best Buy in Manhattan. Employees laughed. Managers freaked. Police were all, “gimme a break”. Hawesome.

My list of Shit that Needs to Get Done was already so big that I think if it were incarnated as a physical object, it would be the sleek, black, infinite monolith from 2001 and I would be the splattered blob of goo just beneath it.

Which is why it feels so much better to just surf on over to Facebook and waste an hour (or two) seeing what my peeps are up to. And working on my score for the “Everlasting TV Show Trivia”. I’m shooting for the ranking, “All-Knowing, All-Seeing Universal Queen of Television Everywhere”. Not sure if that ranking exists, but what the hell, I’ll be a trailblazer if I have to.

Stupid resetting score…

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