Stacked interrupts

Thanks to Scott's evangelism I'm running friendfeed (now via FriendDeck) and Twitter via Tweetdeck, as I mentioned a couple days ago. A whole bunch of old colleagues suddenly surfaced: it reminded me of the heady old days of constant chatter and cross-linking on the then-nascent blogs.

But my day yesterday basically went to hell schedule-wise as I dealt with the data torrent. Something would catch my eye: when I explored that link something else would divert me to yet another location.

The whole process reminded me of the computer concept of interrupts, whereby a higher-priority process can interrupt lower priority code. Interrupts can be interrupted up to the ability of the processor's memory registers or 'stacks' to hold the interrupted code.

Yesterday's chain of interrupts waaaay overloaded my 'stack.' Spouse came home to find mail not sorted, wash not moved over and recycling bins still on curb. She was sweet about it, though. Nevertheless, this morning she looked at a half-dozen parallel waterfalls of posts, links, photos and other data pouring down the screen like the opening scenes from The Matrix trilogy and asked me if I thought I'd have time to shop and make dinner. Either I'm getting slower or the net is running a whole lot faster...