Daily check-in thread for March 29, 2008

Good morning! Good morning! Good morning!

Lovely long practice, although I am very stiff and sore from living hunched over a computer. Today I will get out into Tucson's gorgeous spring weather, hike, and try not to slump.

Love to all,

MfC

I come into this day with {21 of 28 for March}.

Promise: 1 hour updating accounts and finances

Hello,

I'm Tadeusz, and my unannounced march challenge was to drop as much Internet activity as I can. I'm kind of Internet addict.

I work as a backend programmer in a really big email system and I study CS. Going completely offline is impossible. It's just about getting control.

So, you see, no daily checkins from me.

Now the march is (almost) past and I can report.

Rules:

The main problem is WWW.

I cut all the blogs, all the webcomics (dozens!), youtube, even wikipedia (,,random page'' was my favorite time killer).
I unsubscribed from all the high volume mailing lists (KDE will not disappear if I don't stay in touch).
I shut down my IRC session.
I outsourced selling unneeded stuff and clutter on eBay to my wife (simplifying posessions should be a well known sport to all readers here).
I ignore all mainstream media portals, which tempt me to participate in political debates online.

Results:

Moderate success. Slight, yet noticeable quality of life improvement.

I identified several Internet services which do provide significant positive value and I keep them:

Skype as a medium to communicate with my friends who moved out of the city.
Two webcomics: QC (A just slept with B, which made C angry, and D now thinks that .... I can't leave them now! I know, soap-opera, but eats <2minutes/day.) and XKCD (I'm a geek after all. Also minor distraction, <10min/week).
email quite manageable at <10 messages/week.

Positives:

I don't crave for many of the things I used to do.
I got total control over university homework. No deadline stress at all.
Pretty progress on my masters thesis. Almost 10 pages in last week!
Improved concentration at work (still not sufficient for my ambitions).
At one point I didn't touch a computer for continuous about 40h.
Time for relax with headphones and music which isn't meant to be background. $200-range headphones.
I generally tried to substitute web with music. I use magnatune.com to stream and to buy music online. Seriously recommended.
Some drawing practice.
Much fun with my sister (she lives only 1 hour drive from me. We should totally meet each other more)

Negatives:

The URLs are stored in my mechanical memory. (you know, just as passwords are typed-in without any verbatim thinking).
I crave for political flame-wars. Quite silly pass-time, indeed.
The worst is when I don't see an obvious entry into the problem I'm trying to solve. Then my mind starts to wonder and the Internet is very few clicks away.

Well, good luck with all your exercises and sleep-schedule adjustments. I go back into my lair now.

-------------------
Technical details:

I started with writing every kind of online activity down (pen+paper style) with big headline: DON'T.
Then I cleaned history of visited URL.s
Then I used /etc/hosts to redirect several hosts to 127.0.0.1
Then I created localhost page with 5 reflections of japanese coast guard cadets (google it yourself). All 404 errors are handled by it too.
The list of hosts quickly grew to circa 40-50 services.
Then I disabled all URL history in web-browsers I use --edited

As you see, I needed several iterations. It's still far from perfect. It's too simple to sudo vim /etc/hosts. (OTOH with browsers which cache DNS it can be cumbersome enough to let me think about my goal before the webpage opens)

I consider writing a DNS proxy in perl that would be able to temporarily whitelist few hosts that I need and generally block everything. Or maybe script squid, or maybe go low-level with ip-tables. I have to think it through.

I come into this day with {21 of 28 for March}.

Promise: 1 hour updating accounts and finances

-"orcmid"

Complete. I end this day with {22 of 29 for March}.

Woke up at 5:40

{15/19} or 79% for 30-day challenge

Words written.

Shaved before computer use.