“Offimatic” at least would kind of sound “Rube Goldberg-esque”

You have to pronunciate with a large “a” “fiestaaaaaaa” and smile!!

Becouse the life is a big fiestaaaaa

My favorite bit of your research is the “Information Surfing” part. I can see how a “skimming lightly over the surface of the water/information” imagery might apply to both the internet and television.

That reminds me, did you know that most people misuse the word “peruse”? It means to read in very close detail, but most people use it to mean skimming briefly over the information. The way languages work, if enough people misuse it, the definition changes.

After a quick search of the etymology of channel surfing I found the following insights:

http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamterm.html

***The new USENET archive at google is a gold-mine for etymology. For example, a bit of research seems to show that the term “net-surfing” originated with Brendan Kehoe, also known as the author of “Zen and the art of the Internet,” an early internet book.

In this thread from 1991 he uses the term to refer to somebody browsing telnet sites (there was no web at the time). Two messages later, Ron Newman talks about how he likes the term and wants to spread it!

However, others claim independent coinage, including possibly Mark McCahil the Gopher developer (they used the metaphor a lot) and others back to the 80s who talked about Information Surfing. Paul Saffo used the term “information surfing” in a 1988 magazine column and reports it was commonly used and “definitely already in the zeitgeist” before he wrote it. Even Marshall McLuhan used the metaphor of surfing data like ur-surfer Duke Kahanomoku.

In addition, the term “channel surfing” shows first use in January 91, and seems to have originated at the same time. Several of the early users of forms of the term claim they did so due to a love of real water surfing, so this appears to be a metaphor of many parents.***

AND…

http://podictionary.com/?p=2307

It makes sense that a word describing a watercourse or a passage through which boats might travel could metaphorically be applied to an electronic channel through which TV signals might be delivered. The first inkling for this was in 1848 in a description of telegraph circuits.

If you were to guess, what date might you place on the a first citation for the following Oxford English Dictionary definition?

“That through which information, news, trade, or the like passes; a medium of transmission, conveyance, or communication…”

Does 1537 surprise you?

I mentioned channel surfing. This got me wondering why it was called channel surfing.

It seems a no brainer that since the internet became big after the advent of TV remote controls that surfing the web grew out of channel surfing and sure enough the first citation for channel surfing was 1986 while web surfing seems to have been 1992.