Two fun things to do when you are bored to the point of tears:
Fun with tinyurl.com
TinyURL is a great service. You paste in a long URL, and it becomes short. For example, the URL for my GoogleImageWhacking post is
http://www.cs-ed.org/blogs/mjadud/archives/000373.html#373
That’s pretty long; almost too long to mail people, too long to retype. So, I go to TinyURL.com, and they give me
Now, that’s not the end of it. You see, the real fun is guessing what is behind other TinyURLs!
For example, the TinyURL http://tinyurl.com/272ab links to an Amazon page where you can purchase A Fisher Price Loving Family Sweet Streets Country House. The TinyURL http://tinyurl.com/270xv links to … some kind of gallery of IRC users; in particular, some guy called… I don’t know. Looks like it’s in Finnish. Maybe.
Tired of guessing TinyURLs? Try this, then:
Guessing Hotmail usernames!
In three easy steps:
- Get a hotmail account.
- Send mail to a hotmail account. Any account. Just guess. For example, you might try heather2002@hotmail.com, or perhaps kenyongrad1994@hotmail.com.
- Be polite, introduce yourself. Wait to see if they write back.
OK. It’s kinda weird, and not as immediately gratifying as the TinyURL idea. Who knows—maybe you’ll meet the love of your life?
OK. I’m done now; honestly, I was just killing 15 minutes between the last bit of “work” type stuff I was doing and heading off to the gym.
Like I said a few posts back, weblogs are a long way off from replacing conferences and refereed journals. 