I’ve been absent from the blogosphere as of late. First, my computer crashed…and no I hadn’t backed up recently. Yes, I know that’s stupid. Lucky for me, my roommate works at a computer consulting firm and he took it in and they fixed it up and recovered my files. But I have to admit that not having my lap top for just a few days made me feel rather lost. We don’t have cable and for some reason, my radio has a hard time picking up a signal, so simple questions like- “Will I need an umbrella later?” or “What time is my flight on Wednesday?” were not easily answerable. Right after this fiasco, I left for SF for 4 days and while there was distracted from most of my online time wasting activities (Facebook, horoscopes, Google Reader, Colbert, g-chat,  the occasional Perezhilton glance). It seems the back-to-back timing of these two events worked wonders in helping to break my internet addiction.  

I’m not sure how it happened, but the end of last semester when I should have been writing papers, I found myself getting sucked into all kinds of nonsense online. When you have to be on the computer anyway to do some research or word processing, it’s quite easy to leave your email open on the bottom of the screen or sign on to g-chat and say hello. Papers I could have written in 3 hours, I was taking 6 hours to write. Ridiculous. Anyway, it’s a new semester and ever since I returned from SF I’ve been much better about my time. I turn off the computer and am able to concentrate on my reading for hours. It feels good to have some confidence in my attention span again.
Now that I feel that I’ve recovered (for now), I would like to mention one of the biggest online menaces…that’s right, Facebook. Now I use it to keep up with events and I enjoy seeing pics of my friends who live far away, but it’s gotten out of control. You do not need to update your status every 20 minutes! Or I have one friend who changes her relationship status about once a day. What’s that about? Does she want people to ask what’s going on? Also, why does my boss want to be my Facebook friend?! I googled “Facebook addiction” and found sites devoted to the topic…and yes, a group on Facebook. This, however, was my favorite find:
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz41-PvBebg