Links from the Intertubes!

First up, an explanation of how tech support really works via XKCD.

What Does the Internet Think - get an answer about what the internet thinks about anything you care to ask it. A cool rough polling system.

20 Reasons to Ditch Soda - they had me at "a 21-year-old woman, drank up to three liters of cola a day and complained of 'fatigue, appetite loss and persistent vomiting.'”

Someone’s gone and hacked a “don’t worry be happy” Billy Bass fish to read out tweets…

Five Reasons Parents Need to Stop Saying "Good job" to Their Kids - can you say "praise junkie?", I thought you could.


10 hot news items you might've missed: Damned atheists, quivering seamen, perverted iPod

Stand Up for Health Care Reform - via the LiveStrong Foundation. The campaign centers around two main tenets:
No American should be denied health insurance coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

No American should lose their insurance due to changes in health or employment.

Window and Tab Spawning Sites

Why do sites feel compelled to spawn a new tab or window for every link you click on? Its a pain in the ass to have to keep shutting down previous tabs when they do this. Is this some way to game advertising or do they do it because they are just so very, very proud of their homepages that they want to keep them loaded up on your browser forever and ever.

This spawning problem is less annoying then the sites that hijack browsers altogether and then see fit to make them as large as possible, difficult to close and overload processors with garbage media embedded in the page. Actually, those sites are waaaay more annoying.

But window and tab spawning is stupid too.

I guess I'm on a stupid and pointless kick these days.

[Update: To clarify my point of annoyance! Sites that open a new window with each click annoy me. Either a new window or a tab. What this means is that, if you go four pages deep into the site, you've got five windows or new tabs. Unlike most sites where the clicked link opens up in the same window or you can right click and choose to open one in a new tab or window.]