Salvatore Iovene

Last week­end I hap­pened to be com­pletely off the net­work. We some­how man­aged to for­get to pay a cou­ple of DSL bills (now set up to be paid auto­mat­i­cally), and the ISP “cut the wires”. Stay­ing off the Inter­net pro­vided loads of ben­e­fits. Let’s see.

1. More time with the loved one. Of course I man­aged to spend more time with my loved one, cook together, watch a movie, just sit watch­ing the telly and talking.
2. Health ben­e­fits. I felt over­all more relaxed, and my eyes felt much bet­ter. Espe­cially because the pre­vi­ous 2 weeks had been very intense, so my left eye had some red in it.
3. More time to read. With no Inter­net, I spent a lot of time read­ing books that were wait­ing to be finished.
4. More pro­duc­tiv­ity. This sounds crazy, but I did some cod­ing for a project of mine that didn’t really need net­work access (no need to check API online, no need to talk with a team mate, etc), and with­out dis­trac­tion I was able to do more cod­ing than the pre­vi­ous week.
5. More time out­side. Not hav­ing much bet­ter to do, going to the shop to fetch food didn’t really feel like wasted time.
6. More TV. Oh wait, this is not a ben­e­fit at all, is it?
7. Less IRC. When I could con­nect to my run­ning GNU/Screen ses­sion which was hold­ing my IRC client in my office com­puter, I found out all the old mes­sages. And that I missed the chance to buy tick­ets for a gig I wanted to go to.
9. Less Usenet. Do you think I cought up with all the threads? Of course I had to go for “mark all as read” and for­get it.
10. Less RSS. My Google Reader had the infa­mous 100+ count of news… but I didn’t give up and man­aged to go through all of them.

What did I found out?
Well, noth­ing new, really. I already know I was addicted to IRC, RSS and USENET! But of course this break reminded me that I can do per­fectly fine without.

Con­clu­sion
I will prob­a­bly spend more week­ends off the net. Not.