If you specify a proxy in Germany, then every single web based transaction will go through that server. As far as the destination website is concerned, you are located in Germany. This can add some delay to the connection, however, since you now need to take an extra hop to get the destination website. E.g.,

Before the connection would go from: your host  destination website

With a proxy in place the connection looks like: your host  Proxy  destination website

Normally, however, if you are using a proxy this is not a problem. Your main concern is privacy rather than connection speed.

Setting up a proxy server connection in your web browser is quite easy. The steps are outlined below:

1. Find a decent public proxy server list. I found this site to be quite useful: 
2. Pick a proxy server that you want to use. This site has proxies available in Poland, Italy, USA, Brazil, etc..
3. Modify your browser's proxy settings to point to the new browser. In Firefox: tools  options  advanced  settings  manual proxy configuration  (enter the proxy IP address under HTTP proxy and click “use this proxy server for all protocols”  click the OK button

Restart your browser and you are now ready to go! If ever you want to disable your proxy server connection just go back into Firefox and reset the connection settings to the previous value (likely Direct Connection the Internet).

For completeness sake, it's worth also mentioning that there are programs that you can buy that automate all this for you. Some examples are ProxyWay and NetAdjust. Personally, I find it more satisfying to manually modify my own browser settings, but I could imagine this programs are also good if you want to auto proxy other apps such as ftp, mirc, etc…

The particularly annoying thing though (imho) is that this entire process is quite manual: multiple clicks to save, multiple clicks to load, and if you've saved many bookmarks good luck ever finding the website link again. Now one could argue that you can use folders to help organize the bookmarks, but once again this is quite manual. I'm not sure about you but I personally do not want to spend the better part of my life telling a computer where it should put my links, so I can find them later. Why isn't this done automatically?

Fast forward to the present and there is an answer… in fact there are two answers that I've been able to come up with to alleviate this painful process. The first answer is that some terribly bright folks created a brilliant tool called “stumbleupon”. Stumble upon completely eliminates the need for you to create or maintain any bookmarks, in fact it does all this automatically.

If you have not tried it out I highly advise that you give it a shot and try it out at Stumbleupon. If you are familiar with Firefox addons than you can instead grab the stumbleupon addon here.

What exactly does stumbleupon do? As best I can tell it uses some form of alien technology to analyze exactly what you are thinking and then finds a site that you will be incredibly interested in. Ok… maybe not, but it does find out what you like / don't like based on whether you rank sites as good (thumbs up) or bad (thumbs down) while you stumble. After a while it will find sites that match your personality and interest. It's a fantastic way to surf… almost like having a tech buddy in your computer that does all the thinking for you. Sometimes he can be a bit perverted... but most of the time he can find some cool stuff 

Now stumbleupon is more of a push technology, that is it will tell you what you want to see. What if you still want to use some old fashioned bookmarks? With all of the processing power of today's computers there must be a better way to connect to sites… uh right?? The answer to this question is also yes, in fact I would say absofreakinglutely yes. The solution is actually quite simple and I have personally found that this mechanism saves me an immense amount of time. The concept is to save all websites that you normally go to on a daily basis into a single folder in your bookmarks. Then every day when you want to surf, go to the bookmarks folder and in firefox right click and choose “open all in tabs”. Then *voila* you will open up all of your websites at the same time… I usually open 30 websites at once wait ~30s until they all load and then click through them with alt-f4.

Using stumbleupon for good'ol surfing and the daily bookmarks has been a terrific time waster… er saver for me and I bet it will save you time as well. If you have any other ideas please respond below.

(btw the idea for the daily bookmark folder came from a brilliant addon called “morning coffee”: find it here. In fact I call my folder “Coffee” in tribute of this excellent addon)