Musings on a White-out Tape Dispenser, and Newsmap

There's a curved indentation molded into the plastic of the Bic Wite-Out tape dispenser, just to the southwest of the 'W' in 'Wite-Out', that you can put your fingernail into and, without much effort, get the whole thing to spin around really fast. Satisfying torque. Aside from the noise of the twirling, which is a kind of hollow, blunt scraping sound, you could really just spin that sucker forever and not really have to worry too much about it skittering across the desk.

Anyway. It's slow at work.

Unrelated and marginally more interesting, a co-worker pointed me to this site today: Newsmap.

Newsmap presents all the news items of the day in colored blocks of various sizes, color representing what sort of news it is (world, national, sports, etc.), and the size representing how many articles related to this story are extant on the web. I'm sure it's a bit more complicated than that, but the resulting display is simple, clean, and very user-friendly. If you bring your cursor over a news box, a pop-up window comes up with the a short summary of the story. When you click the box, you're taken to a new window/tab. Me likey. Doubt it'll streamline my surfing much, but it gives a nice overview if you're in a pinch and want to get caught up on the Right Now right now.