Artsblog

Seeing as a very special week is coming up for Artsadmin Artsblog it got me thinking about blogging and the internet in general as I was checking my Yahoo mail at college. Then I logged out of my account and instead of bringing up the logout page it told me, “SITE BLOCKED”. To log out of Yahoo? Really? WHY?

There’s a reason why many areas of the internet are blocked at schools and colleges. Flash game sites, blogging sites, video sites… it’s all a distraction from concentrating and getting down to some serious work. A lot of workplaces have the most popular distractions/websites blocked, such as Facebook. And, okay, so it’s rather annoying when you’re trying to research candy and the firewall blocks you because it might be porn…
But then you get home…
And all intentions to finish that bit of work and get this thing and that thing out of the way go straight out of the window once that computer goes on and there are a million distractions at your fingertips.
Now, perhaps you’re the kind of person who’s really good at saying… “NO! I shall not check my Facebook for new notifications. I am NOT going to look at LOLCats and spend ages laughing at silly pictures of cute kittens speaking with horrific grammar. NOT UNTIL I FINISH MY WORK.” If so, good on you, and I’d like to meet you just so I can say I know ONE person with such willpower.
If only we had a firewall at home, right? Well, of course not, then we wouldn’t be able to use Facebook and similar ANYWHERE. But what if there were some kind of timer we could set, perhaps it just let us on for an hour when we get home… maybe for a few hours later in the evening… or maybe a kind of meter where we could clock up only a certain amount of hours per day…
But how on Earth would that work? Surely we’d have to be allowed to set our own limits, but how to make it difficult to just switch the home firewall off when we want more time?
Damn it, does that mean we’re just going to have to rely on our willpower to avoid these distractions?
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!
Oh, okay, fine, responsibility must be taken, I shall avoid checking my Facebook every five minutes, I shall only look at a few LOLcats and then shall move on, I HAVE DEADLINES TO MEET! Looking at my notifications is not worth not getting a good response to my final show!

Let me just go on Minekey for a bit and then I swear I’ll get on it…