Leaving aside the fact that this is essentially an amusingly callow act, the Prize for Peace did it’s job and became almost universally respected as the premier badge of honour for statespersons of any kind, willing or accidental. In the last few years, however, there has been a general realisation of the power that the award bestows on it’s recipients – that it opens doors and grants a basis for argument in ways that were previously unavailable – that it also enables change. To a committee of those passionately interested in promoting peace, this is an opportunity that you really cannot miss, and so they started getting creative with the rules – started actively using it to empower agendas rather than rewarding success.

Logically, the next step in the discussion is to debate the pros and cons of such a decision, but I’m less interested in arguments like ‘it would be irresponsible to *NOT* make use of such an opportunity to mong peace’ or ‘it is not being applied correctly according to the rules the committee is bound too’. I’m more interested in the real and unintended effects of this course of action. I believe that by using the award in this way the committee members are rapidly spending the value of the prize – that soon all value built up over the years will be lost, and that the award will have no greater effect than trying to empower a diplomatic mission by waving an Oscar for Best Actor.

I think what I may be getting at is that if the committee really want to change the way the prize is allocated – to make it a tool for promoting peace, rather than a reward for achieving it – then maybe the change should be a smarter one; To create a new prize for hope and promise while keeping the existing one for it’s intended (and valuable) purpose – of rewarding success in the pursuit of peace.

It constantly emits sound, whether I am sitting in front of it or not. Chimes, chords, marimbas, barks, boings, crickets, quacks, strums, klaxons, pings, whistles, bells – on particularly bad occasions it sounds like a perambulating one-man-band. Honk, clash, honk, clash, paaarp! I’ve considered taking it out busking.

The reason for some of these alerts I understand – new mail, for example, or the imminence of an important meeting. Fresh tweets. The various online appearances of good friends and other people I hate.

The rest? I have no fucking clue. F’rinstance, it regularly used to make a troubled quack (somewhat like a quizzical but mildly alarmed mallard) every day at 10:49am. Every day. At 10:49am. What possible recurring event could take place at such a time, and why does it merit the attention grabbing desire of a worried duck?

I eventually found this one, deep in the preferences of some unremembered third-rate download manager was an ‘alert when checking for update’ checkbox. What lunatic thinks it is important to inform me when it is *checking* for upgrades, and that the default setting should be ‘on’?

I’ve given up trying to find them anymore. I just treat the machine like an embarrasing farting grandmother. If it whistles like R2-D2 while I’m hot-chocolate-desking in Le Pain Quotidien, I just fend off the suprised looks with an uncomfortable shrug. And blame the AIBO.

Related to, but not to be confused with #6: Uncomfortable Alerts.

1. you can ignore them, in which case, there is no problem;
2. you can click them one by one and read (or reject) the opened page before going ‘back’ to the main story, but this makes parsing the original narrative somewhat tricky;
3. you can ctrl-click them all into new tabs and read them later, after finishing the piece you are currently reading.

If you’re of even a mildly obsessive compulsive sort, this latter approach is the most logical approach to the media form and you will do it without thinking – I often forget to click without my pinky on ctrl.

The problem with this, of course, is the disposition of bloggers and wiki authors to compulsively spot their posts with links to their friends and sources.  So almost every tab you open contains more in-text links and each ctrl-click spawns another tab. Before you know it, you are at the heart of a tabulation explosion – so many tabs, disappearing off into some hidden tab dimension like lemmings plunging into the North Atlantic.  My God – it’s full of tabs!

And what happens when you hit a rich vein of embedded video? Suddenly eight crossed streams of audio make your PC start behaving like a busy night in a city pub.  Clumsy arguments that could never occur in real normality spring up between face-planting skater-fools and too-cool conference rockstars. Suddenly you are off in a game of #4: Tab Hunting, trying to find them all and pause them before your brain implodes.

What will halt the incessant tabulation? Well, obviously, you will realise that it is in your power.  By then, however, it is too late – you almost certainly will have opened so many tabs that you’ll have no idea what they relate to when you eventually get to them.

You give up! You stop opening tabs and go back to doing something else, but you don’t close them – there might be something interesting in there. Cue four days of #1: Click Amnesia.

This can be particularly bad if you are in a shared office environment and the page is of an unsavoury nature – the look of perplexed surprise comes across as a comic over-attempt to hide your browsing delinquencies – a kind of “what the hell? Oh my good, you think I… how dare you!” pantomime.

If the tab opened contains a quiet page, it can sit unnoticed for days. Opening a page with an embedded YouTube video tends to cause a more swift reaction, and can provoke a quick game of #4: Tab Hunting when the audio kicks in.

Common causes of Click Amnesia (other than basic crapness) include ‘blog posts with too many in-text links’, ‘funny mailouts’ and, of course, bulk catch-up reading on Twitter clients.

No, it’s not a lust for sex. It is not a religious zeal or a patriotic urge. It is not a narcissistic preen or an inconfidant whine.

“What was I just doing?”

It’s like some awful hybrid of early onset Alzheimer’s and post adolescent ADHD. No matter what I am doing, the smallest thing can distract me and hold my attention for just long enough for me to forget what I was doing just *two* *seconds* *ago*! And this digital life is so full of little distractions.

So I have decided to catalogue and classify these desktop distractions so that I can talk about them with the the similarly afflicted. And we will start with this one… #1: Click Amnesia

I’ve been told that I really should start a blog. No, really. I don’t understand, it seems, how dreadfully important it is that I start a blog.

Why would I do such a thing? What do I have to say that could be so fascinating? Who on earth would want to read it? I have been assured that that is not the point. Unfortunately, I have not been told what the point is. So I’m actually no wiser, only slightly less confused.

This, so far, is it. Impressive, huh?