average life

Not that I waste time online at work, of course, but I realize some people may find themselves turning to the web to fill in those brainless hours, around 2pm, where the couch in their office is cruelly tempting and the window into the hallway and glass door of your office prevent you from just curling up while listening to the nature sounds of waves rolling in on sun drenched shores of…man, 2pm sucks.  Anyway, the following websites will help you be even more efficient in your pursuit of online distraction.

Meebo

Nothing kills time like IMing other people who are at work and actively pursuing distraction also.  What?  Your IT department won’t allow you to install programs on your computer?  Well, that’s where Meebo.com comes in.  Type in the login of the IM program you use (they support AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Gmail/Jabber, and ICQ) or if you create a meebo.com account (frizzle) you can sign into multiple IM networks at the same time.  The site will pull in all your buddy lists and works like any IM program complete with a soft chime when you get a new message (which you can turn off).

PANDORA

This web based radio station works like real radio should.  You start by creating a “station” based on what you want to listen to.  Instead of selecting a genre, however, you type in an artist or even a song your in the mood for and Pandora will start throwing songs your way that are in the same vein of the song or artist you typed in.  Give songs a thumbs up or thumbs down to let it know what you like and what you don’t, which will make the station better over time.  Death Cab For Cutie radio is awesome, you know, FYI.

Google Reader

We know that you check for updates on the four bajillion blogs that you follow, like, every five minutes.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could check all those blogs and websites all in one place…every five minutes?  Google Reader is an RSS feed aggregator that allows you to do just that.  You’ve probably heard of RSS feeds.  Feeds are a way for people to have content from their favorite websites delivered to to them.  Just sign into Google reader and click the “Add Subscription” button (don’t worry, it’s free).  Type in the address of the blog or website you want it to check for updates and bam, the site now comes to you.  Almost all blogs have RSS feeds (even yours) and most regular websites now do as well.

Digg

Digg is a social news website (add “social” to your webspeak to make the kids think you are cool) in which the users of the site select the most interesting stories that appear at the top of the list.  It can have a heavy nerd slant at times, but more recently it has a nice mix of general news, politics, tech, weird news, and funny pictures involving kittens.  Great time suck.

UNBLOCK.BIZ

Have a website you want to visit (like your Gmail), but your company’s firewall has blocked it?  Well, you could try using a proxy server like Unblock.biz.  It’s basically a go-between between you and the site you are trying to visit.  As long as Unblock.biz isn’t, well, blocked by your company’s firewall, you can type in any address into the box on the site and surf away.  Your company will only see that you visited Unblock, but not what site you used it to see.  It is a little slower than visiting the site directly and it generates pop ups ads every few minutes or so, but if you need to do a quick webmail check or something, it’s definitely a good tool to have.