I like routines. Whenever I find myself in a new situation or environment, I seek to establish new routines. I guess I find comfort in it.
And so I have established a routine with my HP Mini netbook, which I purchased a year ago. It's a routine which concerns my online browsing pattern.
What I do is, I fire up my Firefox web browser, which takes me straight to my homepage, Google.com. Then, in the same browser window I open three new tabs: Kamus Orisinil, Google Translate, and Kateglo. In the drop-down menu on the homepage of Kateglo, I select "Glosarium". In Google Translate I select "Dutch" from the left-hand drop-down menu and leave the default "English" in the right-hand sided panel. I don't use Google Translate to actually translate stuff, but I use it rather as a handy Dutch-English (v/v) dictionary.
From the homepage I go to Google News and search for the following news items by typing in these sets of key words – in turn and in this particular order – into the search bar: "marco van basten", "van halen", "slash guitarist", and "guns n roses". I sort the news by date, do the necessary reading, and once I'm done I restore the tab back to Google Search.
Next I open a new tab and go to NU.nl to browse for the latest in the Netherlands. Reading readers' comments is actually more fun than reading the actual articles. When I'm done, I close this tab.
I open a new tab and go to Youtube.com and type "andre van duin" into the search bar before selecting "Upload date" from the "Filter" drop-down menu. We do the necessary downloading (if any), and when finished, we close it.
For a while this was it and I would be good and ready for the order of the day. But recently I've added something new to the routine.
I open a new tab and go to geodruid.com, and explore Wormerveer in "Street View". This is way cool and I've procrastinated many hours exploring the streets of my old hometown, so by now I've seen most of the stuff I wanted to see and the exploring has waned a bit, though I still consider it as part of the routine.
It was only a matter of course then for me to go and roam the streets of Amsterdam, in "Street View", and whilst circumnavigating the Dam Square my eyes fell on a cafe awning on which was printed www.amsterdam-dam.com. I went and clicked on "Webcam", and before I knew it I ended up on a page broadcasting live feed from a cam overlooking the Dam Square. This particular page I will open in a fresh tab from time to time throughout the day.
The Dam Square is covered with snow as we speak.
PS: I'm looking to work in the official twitter page of the Dalai Lama into my routine. Good stuff.
