"Honey, will you please stop doing that?" my Love of My Life says to me.  "What?" I reply, my concentration broken.  "Will you *please* stop flipping through the webpages so quickly?" she repeats, "I can't follow what you are doing, and you're starting to give me a headache." 

I turn back to the computer monitor and see approximately seven windows of Internet Explorer open, all cascaded upon each other. "I'm so sorry dear," I apologize somewhat sheepishly.

You see, Dear Traveler, I have this bad habit of being an extremely *impatient* web surfer.  I simply cannot stand browsing webpages in a linear fashion, waiting for one page to load, reading the content, then loading the next page, and so on and so forth.  No, I find that an extremely inefficient method to surf the internet.  My philosophy?  Why wait for one page to load when you can have multiple pages loading in the background while you read one that is already loaded?  Thus you minimize the "wait time" and can transition quickly from one webpage to the next.  Couple that with the fact that I am an extremely fast reader and the end result is a person skipping from one webpage to the next as fast as the information can be processed.  It is almost second nature now that I'm not even aware I'm doing it unless someone mentions it.  Right-clicking on a link and selecting "Open in New Window" is a good friend of mine.  :)

What an outside observer might define as "eccentric" or even "highly annoying," I'd like to think of as "maximizing the web surfing experience."  I've found that I exhibit this multitasking behavior in many facets of my life.  I have a difficult time just focusing on one single thing at a time.  Instead, I must have multiple things going on at the same time.  Even as I write this Entry, I have a potato nuking in the microwave and music playing in the background.  

Slightly neurotic?  Probably.  Very annoying?  Most definitely.  But it *can* be a useful and desireable skill at times, especially in the workplace as I'm almost always working on more than one project at any given time.  Just one of my idiosyncracies that is a part of who I am.  :)

Useless (math-related) Links of the Day

prime number pooping bear (rated G version)

prime number pooping bear (rated R version - due to language)

where in pi (3.141615...) does your birthdate appear?