Monday, May 25, 2009

farhad manjoo hogs all the fun jobs

So, I've had a crush on Farhad Manjoo for a while. I like reading Slate.com, and he is by far my favorite writer there (sorry Emily Yoffe!)

And then he wrote an article titled "Kill your RSS reader, and use my amazing system for browsing the web." And it is amazing, even though it made me feel dumb for not having an RSS reader yet.

RSS was always something that I saw at the end of articles and ignored. I knew RSS readers put all the stuff you wanted to read on one page, but I didn't know how exactly you could "sign up" for one, or if that was even the right terminology. I read a Wikipedia article that could not have been less helpful if it had tried, and kind of gave up for a while. Scrolling through pages looking for content was therapeutic, kinda.

Then, right after reading Farhad's article, I signed up for Google Reader, which he had oh so helpfully noted in his article. Was that so difficult, Wikipedia? Of course, he noted it while, umm, rendering it obsolete. In my defense, I have a crazy old version of IE on my computer at work that doesn't have tabs, so his amazing system would not work for me. (What? Shut up! I read stuff during lunch...)

But there was a bigger take-away point to the article than my finally getting an RSS reader or learning Farhad's amazing system (which totally sounds like a real estate get-rich-quick scheme, when I put it like that). Because Farhad just had to go and say this:

And that's pretty much how I spend my day—opening up a lot of tabs,
middle-mouse-clicking all of their pertinent links, and then going from tab to
tab in a never-ending quest for new news. I'm telling you, it's totally fun.

Farhad, you do not have to tell me, I know that's totally fun! And you get paid for it, and now I want to go all Freaky Friday on you. Because there aren't any job descriptions out there that go "Tab through the internet for 8 hours and then write something pithy about it." And that picture of you, from the beginning of this post? That was from a University website. And you have a book. And since there's no way I would qualify for your "totally fun" job, now I have to research body-snatching. Are you happy now?

2 comments:

  1. Jealous much? Very funny blog entry!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I don't know what job I'd steal if I could.

    Hmmm...

    Successful(this is the key word) science fiction writer. Wait... VERY successful science fiction writer. Yeah, that'd be good.

    ReplyDelete