dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

Where's that good ol' analog time?


I started writing this as comment on Vermyndax, but I figured it would be better to post here.

Vermyndax:

I'd personally like to hear about your trials/tribulations that let you to attempt giving up electronics...

Meh, it's more that I find myself overusing electronics. When I wake up, I get my pda and fetch my e-mail through wifi. Then I go get breakfast and may boot my laptop to read some news. On my way to university/work I read ebooks [quite fun/useful actually] or news/rssfeeds I crawled recently and downloaded to my pda with Plucker.

When on an internet connection, I find myself checking my online feedreader [currently Bloglines, soon to be replaced with my own overload feedreader], reading news from various other sites, surfing for hours etc.

When I come home, I go sit on a couch, get my laptop booted on my lap and sit there until sleep calls. Even when we're watching some good series on television, the laptop is always nearby [can come in handy as tv guide, fact book or whatever].

It's just that I find myself looking at a pile of unread "Natuur en Techniek" magazines [a science magazine here in the Netherlands that's loaded with interesting articles I want to read, but just don't do, because I'm always reading other things]. And lots of other things to do, like housekeeping, my photographing hobby [where a digicam is a very handy tool], and even my old writing and drawing hobbies. Writing can be done on my pc too [as I've been doing all time], but most of my time I'm just sucking up information. Or reading a great series as the Wheel of time series.

Sooo... basically I should just cut the crap and stop trying to get so much information fed to me. Problem is that I totally love information. I can't get enough of it. So I need to find a way to restrict my time taking it in and doing other [relaxing] things. My pda helps me spending my time more useful by letting me read some info while waiting for/sitting in a train, but I just have to cut down the information stream a bit I guess.

No clean cut with electronics/gadgets for me [as Mark did], but my old problem of dividing my time better and cutting down the time I spend feeding myself information.

Phew, time for some beer.

BTW, it says something that I'm sometimes jealous of cats because of their almost careless life. Heh, except that they generally don't like beer :)