Sudden Slow-Down

Is it just me or did things just get really slow all up in here? It’s probably true that the usable speed of any given computer, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, is ninety percent mental with the other fifty percent being megahertz. Which is to say that if you think your computer is slow, then it’s going to start feeling slow. This is especially the case if Steve Jobs announces a brand new computer, claiming that it runs twice as fast as its predecessor, which itself ran probably twice as fast as the computer you’ve been slogging away on for the past two years.

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Get Shorty

You have no shortage of options if you’re looking to alias extremely long Web addresses into snappier and more email-friendly forms, converting URLs as long as three dozen or more characters and loaded with database and cookie values into a succinct form that even a human might be able to memorize without a Johnny Mnemonic download. The most popular of these seems to be TinyURL, but my favorite is LessLink, because it allows a user to create meaningful aliases by entering her own descriptors, which are then used to construct the URL itself. A typically lengthy link to an Ebay auction, say, might be easily condensed as lesslink.com/obsolete/already/. Other services even allow link tracking and other meta-services to track the traffic passed through your alias.

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