Motherload

My daughter and I have agreed to give something up for Lent. I'm giving up extra sugar, she's giving up excessive time online, and limiting it to half an hour ( not including schoolwork time ( for terms and conditions read the small print )). It's as impossible to give up sugar completely as it is to stay off the internet now. Some form of sugar is in most everything we eat, whether it's processed or not, and since my girl was given an iPad by her school, there is literally no way she will be able to remain internet-free from now on. The techno tsunami has washed into our house. In the run up to Lent I was eating more and more sugary nonsense, in a bid to cope with stress, and my lack of time to write. Meanwhile she was always creeping off to her room to message friends, and spend extraordinary amounts of her time on apps entitled things like, 'Tropical Fish Bundle', 'Hollywood U: Rising Stars', 'Kim Kardashian: Hollywood' etc. She has al...

Good reads is a site I joined back in 2007 on the recommendation of a friend. Five years ago I felt it might be another internet time waster, but as the years have gone by, I have found myself unable to regulate or account for my reading. I'm starting to think that perhaps listing what I have actually read, and what I want to, mean, absolutely ought to read, might be an excellent idea. It's all part of my concerted attempt to embrace the web. Unfascinating for those of us who realized we were riding a revolution as big as Gutenberg quite some time ago. But perhaps some will sympathize. I have an iphone, and now, hot on its heels, an ipad. My world has inverted. I am always where the information I need is. I can pull the universe to me. My time management has changed on a dime: something I learnt to do while in a recent research job with very tight deadlines was to use an online calendar to plot my every action. I loathed doing this at the time and felt as if I was going mad i...