Monday, June 25, 2012

Web links for the bored

So Mondays are the days that our releases are well, released. While this means that my boss is extremely busy making sure that everything that we fixed over the week are actually correct, both me and the intern are the exact opposite of that. And doing "nothing" for 8 hours is extremely boring. And it's impossible to Facebook/Gmail/do-social-media-related-things for 8 hours. Which is why I have a list of links that I go to cure my boredom.

1) FreeRice.com - Not only are you curing boredom, but you're also helping end world hunger, 10 grains of rice at a time! For every question you answer correctly, FreeRice donates 10 grains of rice to the World Food Programme. The questions are in various categories, ranging from SAT prep to English Vocabulary to Basic Math. In order to track your progress over time as see how much rice you've donated in total, you have to create an account, but you can easily play as a guest as well. I'm currently at 29,380 grains, and hoping to reach 50,000 grains.

2) wikipedia.com - We've all used wikipedia when we need information, but sometimes, it's fun to just visit the website, and click on the "Random Article" link on the left hand side of Wikipedia's home page. To get there from the link, click on your preferred language, and you can find the "Random Article" link on the left. Many times, the articles that the Random Article link links you too will remind you of a topic that you wanted to read about at one point, and now, with all of your free time, you finally have time to read about it. For instance, today, I remembered that I wanted to know more about the Knights Templar, and spent 15 minutes reading just about the history of the order. Boredom somewhat cured!

3) WikiGame - Somewhat along the same lines as #2, this link points the Speed Race part of the WikiGame website. You're given a wikipedia page to start at, and using the links in that page and subsequent pages, you need to make it to the "goal page" of that round. And you compete against other people to see who can get there the fastest, which is possibly the best part of this game if you're an extremely competitive person (cough me). The last few rounds have been from Iceland to ABBA (which was solved in three clicks- Iceland-Sweden-ABBA), Linear Regression to Walrus, and Toronto Raptors to Tibetan Scripts. Pro tip if you're reading this blog: if you can't find an obvious connection between to the two topics, try to get to the United States (or another country's) page, because that links to a variety of topics.

Hope this helps! I'm going to go check Facebook, and then go back to FreeRice!

Cheers,
Brown CS Girl (:

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