I’m getting anxious to slap down my $7.50 to watch Spider-Man. The reviews sound relatively positive and I want to be able to form my own opinion about the red and blue superhero. I would have gone to see it this very eve-of-ning, but I was supposed to pick up a friend of mine at the airport. Note I said I was supposed to, implying that I never actually did. You see, there was a slight problem. He missed his flight and I didn’t get the voice mail relaying that helpful tidbit of information until about 5 minutes before he was supposed to arrive. I was already waiting for him at the airport, but luckily it wasn’t a total waste of time because there was a cute girl in the car next to me that provided me with something to look at while I waited.

After reading a glowing review of Attack of the Clones I can’t wait to see it. He said it was a five out of five and possibly the best Star Wars movie so far. I would make plans to watch it on opening night, but I’ll be doing benchmarks on a cluster at Argonne National Lab in Chicago. A group of us from work will be seeing it on the 24th though and since I won’t be paying for it, I can’t complain.

I’ve found a programming blog that I have deemed worthy to add to the holy list. Some of the very insightful posts related to programming struck a chord with me. I think it was a C#. Thanks to evhead for the link.

I’ve been listening to a lot of country music recently. I guess that’s what happens when you live in Utah. I found out that Jo Dee Messina covered Marc Cohn’s song Silver Thunderbird. I’ve been a fan of Marc since his first album back in 1991 and one of my favorite songs is Silver Thunderbird. It was strange at first to hear another person singing it, but I like her version as well as the original.

I’ve been guilty of this in the past, but when you create links, please use descriptive text. “Click here” is neither descriptive nor useful. You need something that will elicit a response. It is an annoyance that most people won’t endure. Who wants to have to read the context to understand what they’re clicking on? A link like cute kitten is self-explanatory. I say the more descriptive the link, the better.

As you probably know, I have a list of blogs that I visit daily. I often find that a link from one blog will lead me down a path several sites deep. After finding that nothing else looks interesting, I back out of the list and continue browsing.

To illustrate with an example, today I visited Matt’s blog and followed his link to Meg’s article, The sanctity of elements. It was a very engaging read, but before I could finish it, I found myself perusing the prose of Mr. Usability Man, discussing the Top 10 mistakes of web design. Superb list by the way. I feel like Jakob has nestled himself right into my brain and managed to suck out my thoughts. I’ve gotten flack about sacrificing “cool” features for the sake of usability, but I continue to believe that a web site is infinitely better if everyone can use it. I dislike sites that use technologies which often give you unnecessary features, unless the feature is crashing your browser, but alas, I digress. After reading Jakob’s article and seeing that most of the links were to his site, I began the process of backing out, or popping sites off the stack. Pop number one put me back at Megnut’s article, which was void of more links. Pop. Back at Matt’s site, which didn’t have any more new content. Pop. Back to my blog links page to begin the click-diving once more.

Wasn’t that some good clean fun? Here’s another popping adventure I had. This one started at Kottke and zipped over to Don’t Mention It. Careful, this next move is only for the more experienced. I performed what is known as a parallel dive, by going to see what the source of kottke’s link had to say about the article that I had already gone to. In that case, I read the article, then read what beebo had said about it and returned to kottke.

Clicking and popping is the main way I browse the web nowadays, with sites popping around like the balls in a Corn Popper. Plus, when site popping, you don’t have to worry about arthritis or swelling of the knuckles. In fact, you can have more fun than a crocodile in a rabbit hatch and it’s much less gruesome.