Geeky Computer Stuff
Computers seem to epitomize the human pursuit of convenience.
People really care about reducing the number of clicks to accomplish a
simple task. If you can ctrl-alphabet something, it’s considered
a drastic improvement over moving your hand to the mouse and clicking
through a few menus. The services offered by Google
are a good example of this. All you really have to do is type in
“www.google.com” and then your search phrase. But if this is too
tedious, you can download their toolbar
so you can just type in the search phrase into a little box at the top
of your browser (this actually has a nice highlight feature that’s
really useful for doing searches). Apparently, even this is too
much for some people, so you can download their deskbar to do a search without even opening a browser.
I’m not really sure what makes us do this. Part of it is probably
just a sense of satisfaction of having improved something, regardless
of whether it really matters. I have to admit to spending some
time figuring out the shortest way to walk from my apartment to the
subway stop, even though the difference involved was probably on the
order of half a minute per trip. On the other hand, I guess
sometimes these little conveniences have a big impact. A while
back I downloaded Mozilla, a
browser that lets you “tab” websites so you can bookmark a whole bunch
of favorites. After I tabbed all the websites I usually visit, I
spend a lot less time on the internet now. So maybe it just comes
down to trying a lot of little things because sometimes they really
matter. Like writing a weblog, maybe.
