Mukund’s adventures

I used to think that internet-addiction was something which some people in some random country did to themselves and got news coverage from time to time. My ADSL splitter died recently and it put my dependence on the internet into perspective. I was without net access for a whole day! It took many hours to even find out what the problem was and I was
definitely upset that it was taking too long.

In parallel, I also realised how much time I was spending on the computer. A few days ago, I forced myself to read through half a novel in two days, but I couldn’t keep my concentration on it for too long and left it there. Mind you, I’m not bored of reading. The novel is interesting and so are the textbooks. And it’s not the first time I’m reading books—I was a bookworm till the time I got internet access about 8–9 years ago.

I have a few books which I borrow from my bookshelf and put in the bathroom for reading and it dawned that I was learning a lot more useful stuff from those accumulated few minutes in the bathroom than the non-programming time I was spending in front of the computer. Obviously I can’t rush back to the computer, and thankfully I don’t have a handheld.

My main usage of the computer/internet can be grouped into:

• Programming and related project management activities, reading API docs and other references
• Reading and replying to personal emails and mailing lists; posting on my blog
• Chatting (also known fondly as loitering) on IRC and Jabber
• Reading the news such as the BBC, Slashdot, popular science articles, cartoons
• Reading blogs of people and aggregators such as Planet GNOME
• Reading technical journals such as on Arxiv, PLoS, ACM, IEEE computer society, etc.
• Ordering stuff on the net through online stores

There’re some things which I can avoid doing and spend that time on more useful items. There are some things which I can’t avoid because of my profession as a programmer. I cannot disconnect my internet connection, or even stop using email or the web.

If you think about it a bit, you can see that you can get a lot more done when you’re not trying to stay on top of things. I don’t need to know what’s happening in the news immediately. I don’t need to read my email every hour (I already don’t reply to people immediately). I do not need to chat at all.

As an experiment and to cut my addiction, I’ve decided to try and operate in delayed batch mode. The sky won’t fall on my head if I don’t use the network today:

• I can check email every 2–4 days, and reply to the accumulated emails at a time. This includes mailing list emails. It’s very unlikely that someone else won’t reply on mailing lists.
• With a web-based RSS reader I can read the news as a batch of stories every few days and keep up with it.
• I am not going to chat anymore.

So what am I going to do with all the saved time? I am going to spend it programming, and reading the numerous textbooks and novels which are gathering dust on my bookshelf.

There’s one more thing I want to write about. What kind of a computer do you use? Do you have a reasonably powerful gigahertz CPU, lots of RAM, a great widescreen display panel, optical mouse and a nice keyboard? Do you sit on a comfortable chair and have a decent large desk? No? Think about it. If you were optimizing your program for speed, you would first profile where your program spends the most amount of time and put your efforts into improving the program there. Typical free software developers spend a lot of time in front of the computer, as we work on our projects at home after office hours. The computer display is what you stare at for many hours. The mouse and keyboard are what your hands use. And you don’t want to be bogged down waiting on the computer either. It doesn’t cost too much to upgrade a bronze age computer lab to a decent configuration. Consider it in units of the cost of pizzas, beer, chips and crisps (maybe I’m being too sterotypical here ).