Tiny Minds and Tiny urls
People have ideas without thinking. Call it a knee-jerk reaction that's half-baked because they really haven't thought it through.
Clever Silliness -- Cell phone annoyance
What is it about people talking on cell phones that seems to get some folks panties in a bunch? So much some public places have banned the dreaded devices. What insidious violations are these cell phone gabbers inflicting on others? Are we suffering an epidemic of second-hand chat?
All a cell phone user is doing is speaking aloud, having a public conversation. People blab away in public all the time and no-one gives it a second thought. If it's OK to chew the fat in some public setting or other, how does doing so on a cell phone make it a whit different?
Recently 60 Minutes ran images of cell phone gabbers in a public park as Morley Safer complained about wasting his time listening to them. This is doubly silly. Nobody wastes your time by talking, you waste your own time by listening. Secondly, how much of Mr. Safer's time was wasted listening to people talking who were not on cell phones?
In the picture above, how is yackety-yack more annoying than blah-blah or yadda-yadda? How is it ruder? If Mr. Grumpy closed his eyes, could he tell the difference?
Here's a challenge, next time you're in a restaurant and someone behind you is chatting away, without looking can you tell if they're talking to someone at the table or on their cell phone? In either case, what possible effect does it have on you? How would this effect be altered with or without a cell phone?
No matter how seemingly clever the joke, annoyance at people using cell phones has to be about the silliest pet peeve ever.
Silly Cleverness -- Tiny urls
I've noticed people are using this tinyurl gizmo in place of the long, ungainly urls you find on some sites. At first this seemed simplified, streamlined, cool. But what is really the point of them? One user said, "It's more practical to post a 25 character link on a blog than a 68."
Really? How? Why? Copying and pasting a 68 character url takes the same effort as a 25. Where's the impracticality? If you had to type it out it's more work, but not to copy and paste. If it's a hyperlink it doesn't display anyway. What is gained?
So what if a url is long, readers are not spending time reading or deciphering long urls. We're not typing out long urls to go to or save a page. We click or copy and paste. In either case the length is a non-factor. The only people wasting time with long urls are the people who created them. They make no difference to anyone else.
Let's say I have a spot in my text document I want to put a hypertext link to a web page displayed on my browser. What steps do I need to take?
1. copy url
2. paste in text document
Done. Total time, about one second.
What steps do I need to take to do the same with a tinyurl?
1. copy url
2. go to tinyurl.com
3. paste url
3. generate tiny url
4. copy tinyurl
5. paste in text document
Done. Total time, about 25 seconds.
A tinyurl is shorter, it's less complicted, it looks cool, it's clever, but what does it actually accomplish? Tiny or big, urls do the same thing. I guess it might impress people with your technical savvy, magically turning a long url into a short one, yet all it actually does is waste your time creating it. It's a pointless gimmick.
Talk about solving a problem that didn't need solving.
copyright Terry Colon, 2008