Virtually There - May 2009

Did you know that Australians and New Zealanders now spend more time on the internet than they do watching television? Not that we are watching less TV you understand. We just don’t get out much any more. Which leads me to the inevitable question: what do people do online?

 

The biggest time waster is email, followed by banking, checking news and weather, looking for directions, making travel bookings and visiting online auctions. Then there is online gaming, chatting and social networking, researching stuff to buy, buying that stuff, blogging and general surfing. What a way to fill the average surfer’s 14 hours a week online.

 

But if you are relaxed about seeing the days of your life flow away through the internet like sands through an hourglass (oops – too much TV), at least try something different. Such as online funerals.

 

Do not recoil. What if family and friends are overseas at the vital moment? Or unwell? It is now possible to have a live webcast of the service so that those who can’t be present can still participate. It’s more common overseas but it is available in New Zealand too. Harbour City Funeral Home offers the service in Wellington, as does Palmerston North’s Robert J Cotton and Sons . It’s free with your funeral and password protected to avoid sightseers.

 

If it helps, you can follow up by creating an online memorial. Memorial sites such as Respectance.com will help you create video and photo tributes and post them (publicly or privately) for others to add to. This is a growing phenomenon in the US – smilingly referred to as “MySpace for dead people”.

 

If this talk is bringing you down, how about something altogether more uplifting? Consider making a micro-finance loan and changing someone’s life. Kiva.org is a person-to-person micro-lending site that lets you advance a small amount of money (starting at US$25) to a specific entrepreneur in a developing country. You choose the person and the amount then Kiva does the rest, including setting up a repayment schedule. This is genuine feel-good stuff – real justification for that time spent online.

 

Maybe all that surfing is making you fat? An excellent use of your online time might just be WeightWatchers Online . You track your weight weekly, record all your food intake and exercise online, and you can see exactly why you are (or are not) losing weight. There are no meetings and no public weigh-ins but a week of snacking can provoke a flurry of encouraging emails. You don’t have to remember the calories in anything – the site is preloaded with nutritional information. If you are fed up with grilled steak and lettuce there are hundreds of recipes; if you twitch at the thought of another walk around the block there are demo workouts.

 

I understand of course that WW may not be your cup of tea (trim milk, please). In that case, visit ThisIsWhyYoureFat.com. There, in glorious Technicolor, are photos of the most calorie-dense foods in the world. Baconnaise. Deep-fried, chocolate-dipped cupcakes with sprinkles. Bacon-wrapped mozzarella sticks. The 30,000 Calorie Sandwich (a sandwich filled with mince, bacon, hotdogs, ham, pastrami, roast beef, bratwurst and turkey, topped with fried mushrooms, onion rings, Swiss/provolone/cheddar/feta/parmesan cheeses, lettuce and butter on a loaf of white bread).

 

This isn’t a website, it is food porn, guaranteed to put you off your tucker and simultaneously make you laugh till you weep. If it looks appetising, get up immediately and go eat a carrot. Then turn off the computer for the rest of the week.

 

Tiny URL time You may have noticed that we’ve introduced a new way of noting web addresses. Tinyurls are a clever way of shortening very long addresses (urls) so that you don’t have to type in super-long strings of characters. For example, when you want to reread my January column (it could happen!) instead of typing in www.nzhouseandgarden.co.nz/Articles/VirtuallyThere-January2009.asp, you can type in www.tinyurl.com/cg6t3z and be directed to exactly the same place. I hope it helps.