Friday 24/05/2002

It was my birthday yesterday. Ouch! What a bad idea that pub turned out to be. And perhaps the absinthe was a mistake... It usually is.

But to ease my frazzled brain, a rather strange search engine swims into view - kartoo.com. You type in a term, as per usual, but not for this French invention the dull old business of lists of results. Oh no -- following a short interval in the company of some man-goat cherry-sucking fez-wearing hybrid, up pops a nice circular diagram with sites represented as shiny blobs of various sizes, connected by colourful strands with concepts attached. Clicking hither and thither adds or removes the names of the concepts to the search terms, and clicking on the blobs brings up the search terms.

It's all a little like those slightly suspect mind-mapping programs that claim to give you the mental prowess of HAL 9000, but more fun and less hard work. I can recommend it to the terminally confused and blootered of bonce as a pleasant way to pass half an hour without entirely giving up the possibility that at some point, useful work might happen.

I wish I knew what the fruit-masticating monster was all about...

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