Saturday, November 26, 2005

How I Wasted the Last Two Hours

I started off my day as I normally do, scanning headlines at Americablog and Smirking Chimp. There's nothing particularly new today, though there's always something scandalous. Then I skipped on over to Delicious, a site AOTS's Scott Moschella pointed me to. Similar to DIGG, it refeshes by the minute or hour (I dunno which) and has some interesting links, tech-heavy. While there, I stumbled across the new Jots website, and became intrigued. Jots allows you to assemble a ton of bookmarks that you can access by logging onto the site. Naturally I set up an account and began to post some of the links I frequent on a regular basis, mostly pages that provide news stories and/or cool links. I put Fark on my list, and then wondered if that were too obvious. Doesn't everyone know Fark already? But then I noticed there was only one other person who had posted Fark. Only two other people had posted Boing Boing. This meant that Jots was a baby website. I had stumbled on a lil' baby site.

So it was time to move on, do something else with my time. But curiosity got the better of me. You see, when you post a link to Jots, you can include tags. I'd left mine unfiled at first, but then I thought it would be more helpful to attribute some kind of tag to them. I decided to see all the Jots tags for the entire site, some eleven thousand and something tags. The "sound" tag caught my eye. Last night I did an experiment to see if I could post recorded audio to Audioblogger by using the doohickey from Radio Shack that allows me to record telephone conversations (which I've used for journalistic purposes). Unfortunately, I hooked it up to a minidisc and the audio isn't detectable. When I hook it up to my mini-cassette recorder it works fine. That doesn't do me much good because the crap I recorded using my cassette recorder is embarrassing and will not end up online if I can help it.

Anyhoo, the sound search led me to Free Sound, a website that contains, uh, free sounds. I listened to some recordings of crickets.

Then I decided to blog about my Internet surfing ways, which brings us to what I'm doing exactly now. And now I'm going to sign off and hopefully do something productive. Adieu.

5 comments:

Enadiate said...

What the bojangles are you talking about? Dicking around on the internet is VERY productive.

I wasted the last 2 hours screwing around in Photoshop, creating a cartoon character. that brings me to a total of 5 hours of working on this little whore, and she's still got about another 2 hours of dedicated work ahead... In regular intervals I've been checking out my various message boards and happened to check my RSS feed to the lovely Laura Swisher's blog, seeing that she had a new post.

So here I am, about to get back to work on this damn flash cartoon character...

Have a pleasant day!

(it's not a request!)

FifthDream said...

Heh, i just found freesound last night. Odd that you'd mention finding it today.

Butternut said...

Apparently it was posted to Slashdot recently so I'm sure it's making it's way around the Internet rumor mill.

Sweet! Glad you found this site and brought it to my attention. I've actually been looking for a free sound effect library for a long long time now. I did some amateur foley and sound effects work for a video game mod at one point. Actually one of my sounds ended up in a Half-Life mod called Counterstrike at one point.

Now that I've been playing a game called "The Movies" I'm itching for more sound effects. The site looks very new, not much on it, but it is promising.

I've been spending most of my online time shopping for Xmas already.

duboisist said...

". . . Jots was a baby website. I had stumbled on a lil' baby site"

Butternut, I can't believe you missed this.

Tim said...

The fine folks over at Fark compete for callousness which digested in mass quantity makes itself evident as sacrasm gone rancid. They do some fine photoshopping though.

I like del.icio.us but it's gotten more tech oriented since it's birth. Check out Gizmodo.com it's tech heavy but totally accesible. They have a nice feature where only those invited can post comments and this includes either other tech bloggers or folks that work for big tech companies.

And though it's not what it once was, lowbrow.com - hit F5 (refresh) it's like the biggest inappropriate Magic 8 ball of all time.

Hope you all had a wonderful Holiday Weekend.