What is it with the Internet that keeps me hooked? The amount of time I spend surfing is, in a word, ridiculous, and I can’t even explain what it is that I do. But I’ll try.

I mean, yes, I do have over a hundred RSS feeds in my reader, and I do read pretty much all of it. (Well, that may be a stretch, I don’t read everything every day but I do scan most of the headlines every day).

But still, nothing beats the Web when it comes to procrastinating.

Everybody knows how to spend hours on YouTube, but I’m not even there. Somehow the Web just sucks time, and before I know it, another hour has flown by. I was sitting by my desk writing a column. Or, I was supposed to write one. This one.

It started innocently enough with a quick peek at the website of a large American computer and entertainment company to see if their support discussion forums had found an answer to a problem with a beta version of their product.

Well, they didn’t, so I decided to see how my Amazon order was coming along. But first, I checked their recommendations. Since they weren’t any good, I decided to improve them by rating and re-rating items I had on their list. That took a good twenty minutes. And now I have “Murder, She Wrote” as my number one recommendation? I have to go back one day.

Tired of Amazon, I clicked on my wife’s blog, and read her latest entry. The one I had read the night before, right after she wrote it. It was still funny. I read my own (!) comment on the entry. Man, I am funny.

And so it went about an hour and a half. Clicking frantically, checking discussion forums, and reading the RSS feeds as soon as they were updated. I even read a newsletter.

And this is all I have to show for that night.