You know it’s happened to you. You were just going to check your email. It was only going to take a few minutes.

Next thing you know, you’ve missed a meal because you were too busy watching videos or yammering away in chat rooms to notice how quickly the time was flying by.

The internet is a great resource for research, but it’s also as addictive as a slot machine, and for the same reason. It puts you on an intermittent reinforcement schedule, rewarding you at pretty much random intervals, just like B.F. Skinner randomly rewarded rats in his maze.

It doesn’t have to be the barking cat or the confused web-cam grandparents. Because the internet is such a motley collection, just about anybody with any obscure interest can suddenly hit pay dirt if only they make one more click. Presto! There’s a clip of Buster Keaton laughing! There’s a picture of the actual train that was stuck in the Tracy cut, that kept the Ingalls family near starvation during The Long Winter! There’s a video of Anna Pavlova dancing “The Dying Swan!” There’s a copy of Dale Earnhardt’s autopsy report! There’s an essay by Chuck Jones about how he became a cartoonist!

What’s worse, no matter how esoteric your interest, there’s a clique of people ready to argue with you about it. You start out just wanting to find out the caloric count of popular vegetarian foods. Suddenly you’re in the middle of a flame war between advocates of soft versus firm tofu (if there really is a debate…really!), and you’re astonished to find that you actually do have an opinion about it, even if it’s that nobody should ever eat tofu.

When you get online, the fact that you were ACTUALLY looking for something specific often falls by the wayside.

With all that temptation lurking, how do you keep yourself on task? Or if not totally on-task, at least honest about how many of those online hours you’re billing your client for?

Well…(sales pitch coming) you can make one more click to a great time tracking program. This product Worksnaps.net tracks computer usage — programs, web pages, you name it. Best of all (if you are fine with Big Brother), they takes periodic screen shots so you (and your boss/client) can see exactly what you were doing at what time.

Of course, this carries the risk of becoming fascinated with your browsing habits and getting sidetracked yet again. Still, it gives you the tools you need to sort out play time from work time, and bill your clients honestly. I find it particular helpful when collaborating with people that you are physically working with at the same location. So, you can turn “Did Tom really work 6 hours on the design” to “I see Tom working on 6 hours of design. Groovy!”

Then (once you are done) you can get back to the Internet Movie Database and find out which critics enjoyed “Cycle Vixins” as much as you did.

Don’t you hate entering in captchas? I really do. Looks like Solve Media is trying to solve this problem by changing the captcha into an ads.

My question though is the reason the captchas are getting so complex is that hackers and black haters (sp?) are pushing the captchas to be more complex. So, if we are going to change this:

…to this:

…seems like the spammers are going to have a field day.

So, I guess the question is are websites willing to get paid for spam? Maybe from the increase in ad revenue that I presume Solve Media can command, they could invest in some in some better email filtering (or move to Gmail ).

What are your thoughts? Do you think company is going to challenge captcha?