WARNING: Nerd Alert. Forgive me.
I installed the Google Toolbar on my Internet Explorer about a month ago, and the main thing it does for me is block popups. 413 of them, currently.
That’s the weird part: It counts how many popups it blocks. And IE is not even my main browser. I primarily use Netscape, mostly because I use Netscape mail.
I can’t even tell how many have been blocked by Netscape since I finally unfucked my computer enough to be able to use its included pop-up blocker without my computer immediately and repeatedly crashing.
But to know that 413 have been blocked in my secondary browser in less than a month tells me two things:
1. There’s a lot of goddamn pop-up ads.
2. I spend way too much time online.
And I don’t even spend half as much as I used to.
Working and my acquisition of TiVo have cut my internet time significantly, along with the fact that my computer becomes angered if heavily used for more than about an hour at a time.
Fortunately, the latter problem may be resolved shortly, but it’s still odd to think that I was plunking away at 400 of these bloody things a month for the couple of months before I got a pop-up blocker.
Oh, and if you haven’t already done it: Get the Google Toolbar.
P.S. – The computer crashed while I was writing this post. I seriously am beginning to think that it actually knows its days are drawing to a close.