Like most people, I suppose I spend too much time being a consumer rather than a producer. I don't mean just of "things" -- this blog after all does talk a lot about fun gadgets. What gnaws at me more is that I consumer far more information, thoughts, ideas, and other expressions than I produce. Now obviously not everyone can be a prolific producer of great thoughts. Even those who are surely take in way more than they generate. I'm not so concerned with absolute values as with my own personal balance. I just like myself better when I can get the time and focus to make stuff.
This blog is one attempt at restoring my desired balance. I made a commitment to a couple of friends to write about whatever we like in a public forum. I like working in teams and exchanging commitments. So far so good.
Something else I did a while back (actually more than 15 years ago) was to kill my television. This has turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. It's not that I don't like TV -- quite the opposite. But I was the proverbial drunk waking up in the gutter the next morning, only in my case the gutter was the TV at 3 AM and the drink of choice was Hogan's Heroes. (Was there ever better entertainment about WW2? Oh wait -- there was).
I looked up some numbers for this post, and it's worse than I remembered:
"The total average time a household watched television during the 2005-2006 television year was 8 hours and 14 minutes per day, a 3-minute increase from the 2004-2005 season and a record high. The average amount of television watched by an individual viewer increased 3 minutes per day to 4 hours and 35 minutes..."
Holy crap people -- four and a half hours? If you commute a total of an hour a day, work and sleep for eight hours, and maybe spend 30 minutes on personal hygiene and just putting on your clothes, that leaves just two hours to talk to your kids, take a walk, read or maybe vote or something.
Which of course brings me back to the point of this post. At any given time, there are probably dozens of very obvious things I can do to improve myself, maybe my family and community and possibly the world. Some of them might be as simple as installing Moveable Type.
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