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Fred Stuzman's Freedom:
Freedom is an application that disables wireless and ethernet networking on an Apple computer for up to three hours at a time. Freedom will free you from the distractions of the internet, allowing you time to code, write, or create. I'm seriously intrigued. Something must be done about my attention span. I sat down to read a book today and felt guilty that I wasn't multitasking.
UPDATE: I tried it, suffering through a full minute of Internet disconnectivity. It worked perfectly. Awesome. I love Freedom.
UPDATE: It just occurred to me that the reason that I've been thinking about how tough I'm finding it to focus is Nicholas Carr's excellent piece in the Atlantic called "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" A forced offline period once or twice a day might be, if not an antidote, then a way of at least relearning how to concentrate. Over on his blog, Carr relates the experience of former chess champ Josh Waitzkin of sitting in on a class at his alma mater Dartmouth:
Over the course of a riveting 75-minute discussion of the birth of Gandhian non-violent activism, I found myself becoming increasingly distressed as I watched students cruising Facebook, checking out the NY Times, editing photo collections, texting, reading People Magazine, shopping for jeans, dresses, sweaters, and shoes on Ebay, Urban Outfitters and J. Crew, reorganizing their social calendars, emailing on Gmail and AOL, playing solitaire, doing homework for other classes, chatting on AIM, and buying tickets on Expedia (I made a list because of my disbelief). From my perspective in the back of the room, while Dalton vividly described desperate Indian mothers throwing their children into a deep well to escape the barrage of bullets, I noticed that a girl in front of me was putting her credit card information into Urban Outfitters.com. She had finally found her shoes!
That's awfully familiar. I had the experience lately of attending a conference and finding myself doing so much online during the sessions -- researching the topic at hand, looking up speaker bios, checking emails, posting to Twitter, checking the weather, looking up nearby restaurants -- that the days just kinda went by in a blur. In very few of the discussions did I every really feel engaged. I got a lot done, but there was something sad about never really being present, especially considering that I was sitting in rooms with some of the best and brightest minds in computers and networks and security -- all stuff I care deeply about.
I'm thinking that I might give Freedom at whirl at the upcoming Personal Democracy Forum conference and try sitting through a few sessions disconnected but for the connections with everyone around me.
Jun. 13, '08
Apple, software
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