Mikhail's Soft Blog

Mope, grumble & rant

One of the good things of having this blog is that - other than on the SSFF - I can allow myself to be gloriously off-topic.

The past three quarters of an hour I did a lot of thinking. This was no fault of my own, but apart from watching the text 'WINDOWS IS CLOSING DOWN NOW' or observing the gradual lengthening of the traybar down right on the screen of our laptop, I only managed to send a away one email and inspect a site - very briefly - on the SSFF. The reason was that the antivirus program needed its weekly update and the firewall got to a new version too. Both required rebooting. To counter your obvious objections, no, this isn't a very old laptop and I like to keep its setup rather clean. Now, imagine you switched on your tv set and you had to spend about 15 minutes to update some bit of crucial maintenance software in its prints, after which you'd have to switch it off again - perhaps only allowing you only a few minutes of the nine o'clock news - and repeat the process for another piece of functionality.

Still, some people think the worldwideweb is some kind of television. They believe you need more than just information and pictures - before you get to anything, you have to watch floating logos, one or two graphics twirling here or there, there has to be an agonizingly slow progress bar progressing somewhere and, of course, you need music. You can't have silent television, that would be unnatural and perverse.
Imagine how happy we were with the music on the site I inspected if you know one of us was suffering the consequences of a long day in corporate life. Yes, she was sleeping.

Music on websites is, all by itself, as mindbogglingly contraproductive and irritating as Flash animations.
People who are not listening to music while websurfing very likely have good reason. They're in a business environment, on a train, or there's someone dozing next to them on the couch.
On the other hand, people who are listening music while websurfing aren't happy with some piece of repetitive musical junk cutting through their Madonna or Monteverdi.

Which leads me to the conclusion that a baffling number of the people who are responsible for creating websites, probably don't do any websurfing themselves.

posted by Eric ForFriends @ 2:31 PM