Technology Sucks Sometimes!

It sucks you right into the abyss of wasted time.  I just spent my last two days of my vacation pouring over the details of getting my blog hosted on a new site.  A buddy of mine had recently been working on getting his blog updated and moved over from a free blog posted site where the options were limited to hosting it himself and now the options were as limitless as the stars on a crisp fall evening in the Ozarks.  He had been keeping me posted along the way, and by the time he had finished I had to admit his site had drastically improved.  So as all good keeping-up-with-the-Jones friends do, I decided to do the same with my site.  Besides, my training was as a computer science engineer and how hard could it be?  Plenty hard, my friend, plenty hard.

 Between waiting patiently to talk to my Go-Daddy representative and reading through countless help pages and calling my guru buddy, I spent hours and hours getting it up and going.  But, I did get it up and going.  I have to admit that I feel a real sense of accomplishment and even though I don’t have it all complete it does feel good to have made significant progress.  And the site does look much better.  But, the thing that I walk away with from the experience was the nagging question: Was it worth it?  Did what I achieve justify the time spent.  My wife and son sat around watching me grimace and gripe and celebrate over some silly computer process.  Did I redeem the time like I should have?  Did I miss some opportunities with them?  Sure I took breaks and went out to dinner and spent several hours playing baseball at the park, but was my disengagement from my family worth it. 

 Now don’t get me wrong, I know that there are times when you have to crank out a project and you miss opportunities.  My point of inference in this post is how much time do we lose trying to figure out the technology that is geared to help us save time.  How many hours do we lose fixing the computer or reprogramming the TV or reading some info piece about some gadget we just bought?  If I am not careful, I will (like some of you) back myself in a corner and be trapped by the things I bought to make my life easier.  And even if it doesn’t take my loads of time the mental toll of thinking through the issue can be exhausting.  There’s a saying I like, “he who lives by technology, will eventually die by technology”.   Technology can be a good thing but sometimes it sucks!  Sucks the very lifeblood out of you.  As soon as I get this posted I am going to bed and dream of hosts, domain managers, uploads and FTPs!  Sweet dreams, huh?