At work I often have some down time, which is different from slacking off. I have chunks of time where I can literally sit and stare at my screen. I would gladly work if I had something to work on, so I try to fill this time up by searching anything that has pops into my head at the moment. I browse through a lot of the SD archives, and tour around the forums here and other sites. They’re great because the sites don’t have a lot of graphics or flashy ads. At the end of the day I often found little satisfaction after looking back at what I did with that time.
I’m trying to find something that might give me some sort of new skill, or anything might have some value. I tried signing up for a site to learn Spanish, but it draws to much attention to itself to people walking past. Basically I’m trying to find someplace that will teach me something useful and doesn’t look like I’m foolin’ around.
Mostly text is good, but a few pictures here and their won’t hurt. I can resize my browser window to crop out most ads that might appear on either side.
I tried programming languages several times in my life, and it never went well. Something about it that I just can’t wrap my head around. I can look at a script and have a fairly good idea of what it does, but I can’t create something like it from scratch.
I tried learning it again earlier this year, but still something in my head doesn’t “work” that way.
If you can, install AdBlock, it’ll cut out the ads. Versions available for Chrome and Firefox.
Can’t really help with the main question, though, as I don’t know enough about your interests.
There are plenty of resources for learning more about, say, Microsoft Office. If you work with Excel, you can do some programming by recording macros without having to write much in the way of code. I personally found Access to be a pain to learn on my own and it may not be worth the trouble as most businesses avoid it if they can use something else. But Word, Powerpoint, Outlook, Visio, are possibly worth learning more about.
If you can wear headphones, you could get mp3 versions of lectures or non-fiction books and listen while the macro you recorded in Excel busily generates random numbers, sorts them, pastes them to a new tab, deletes them, and repeats. Move the mouse now and again and push some buttons so the screen saver doesn’t kick in and if anybody asks you say “oh, I’m just trying to fix a problem I have with this spreadsheet”. Not that I’ve ever done anything like that myself.
You could fix minor flaws on Wikipedia. There are several projects such as the Typo Team and Disambiguation pages with links which can benefit from little bouts of random, disjointed labor from a lot of people.
It’s a bit addictive, as once you start fixing one set of problems, you stumble across others that aren’t that much trouble to fix, and before you know it your Preferences page is telling you that you’ve made thousands of edits.
Just about every university has distance learning courses - some for certificates, some for degrees and such. Even better, materials for dozens, if not hundreds, of MIT courses are available online for free here: MIT OpenCourseWare | Free Online Course Materials
How about listening to podcats? Econtalk.org / Radio Lab / This American Life / NPR Planet Money / More or Less: Behind the Stats / The History of Rome / Freakonomics Radio / History of the World in 100 Objects / A Brief History of Mathematics / London School of Economics: Public Lectures & Events
That should get you started <g>
Thanks for all the responses!
I’m not looking for any subject in particular. I guess I’m just looking for some change of pace from my normal routine of browsing a forum here, checking a news article there, rinse/repeat.
I think I’ll give a shot at the podcasts first, that might be something I can listen to on and off throughout the day.
The www.somethingawful.com forums are the biggest time wasters on the internet, followed closely by www.reddit.com the front page is basically full of email forwards but the /science /politics and /til will always kill an hour or so.
If you’re using Chrome, check out the apps store. There are tons of great games, projects, newsfeeders etc with available apps for free.
Also, if you’re into perusing the web for interesting things, I can’t recommend tumblr enough. Flipping through random tumblr pages is delightfully weird. There’s so much odd and wonderful stuff out there, pretty much anything somebody thought was worth putting on the web.
www.stumbleupon.com has links to things of just about any subject you can imagine. A lot of the stuff you’ll hit is “meh” but you will run into gems that you really want to explore further.
