After months of the life of hermitude, I finally have the mighty tubes reconnected to my house. It’s nice to be back, but it is also good to go through a period without Internet access. My life is more balanced now because I see what the Internet  is good for, and where it can be a time-wasting pain in the ass. It has also readjusted my thinking on the importance of computers in my life in general.

It’s really easy for me to sit down in front of the computer and just waste time. That’s OK if that’s what I need to do, but I hate to get up hours later and find that I’ve done nothing. I need a certain amount of productivity balanced with a reasonable amount of leisure time to stay sane. Now I leave the computer off most of the time, and when I sit down to work, I do what I came to do then walk away. I gain lots of time that way.

On some subliminal level the computer symbolizes work so much that when I sit down at my desk at home I have this feeling of anxiety about getting things done. If I plan what I’m going to do when I sit down, do it, then get up it works.

I do a lot of journaling, and I’ve moved that mostly to paper and pen. I miss being able to have backups of everything I’ve written and being able to search my writing based on date or keyword. Other than that, writing on paper really has advantages. It keeps me from bleeding away time with editing stuff I may never read again, it gives me more of a 2D approach to layout, and I can carry a journal and write anywhere.

So it’s nice to be forced to re-establish my priorities a bit. Sometimes it takes an unavoidable external influence to get me there.

I have temporarily lost access to my home E-mail account. That account died completely (and probably won’t be resureccted) around Jan 10. I’ve got a few hundred E-mail boxes available on the server that serves up this very site (thanks to 1 and 1), so I’ve created a new acount there.

I’m not going to post the address here, but if you have an address for me just take the username (the part before the @ symbol) and graft it onto @jeffratliff.org, and it will probably work. If you get it wrong I’ll probably get it anyway as all mail going to jeffratliff.org gets to me eventually.

If you have my Gmail address that one is still good also. If you don’t have it, it’s because I usually only use that one for mailing lists and other boring stuff. It’s not because I don’t like you. 🙂

Sorry about all the chaos. I prefer stability, but I can’t control a lot of things (or actually anything).

OK, so I’ve got too much time on my hands (lately). I read a lot, but mostly non-fiction books. I like to have something around just for pleasure so I don’t feel like I’m working all the time.

 I went to Half Price Books and picked up a copy of Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card for a few bucks. It’s one of the many Science Fiction books I’ve always wanted to read and never got around to.

I’ve read nearly everything Robert Heinlein ever wrote. I’ve read Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and the Robot novels and a few other things. I’ve read Dune, the Hitch Hiker’s guide series, 1984, Brave New World and a lot of other books. There’s still tons of good Sci Fi out there I haven’t read, though.

I found a list of the top 20 Science Fiction novels (evar!!!) that I had saved somewhere, and plugged all the ones I haven’t read into my Amazon wishlist. It’ll give me something to work on for the next few months. Probably won’t make me any less of a geek, though.