No Justice, No Peace! No Peace, No Justice!

Ever since this post I've been making an effort to streamline things, in order to better concentrate on the things that matter. It's been pretty good. I mean, I'm still not training, which has meant I've got lot of spare time, but instead of concocting plans that will, at some point, inevitably clash with training, I've been doing more prosaic things, like reading, or writing this blog. That's pretty nice and all, but I'm still on the lookout for other things that I'm wasting time on. Which brings me to social networking.

I'm ok with Facebook. Sure, I have a minor addiction, but I never get all that worked up about it. I'm not addicted in the slightest to Twitter, but occasionally enjoy the links to articles, blogs and photos. I've also been known to use it to publicize certain events. If it was just those ingredients, with a sprinkling of email here and there, I'd be happy with the salad my internet experience has prepared. But instead, I end up wasting way too much of my time and energy arguing with randoms on messageboards. It's like eating that salad, then smoking an entire pack of cigarettes.

Sure, there's a lot of good to be had anywhere a bunch of people congregate in order to share ideas. But it's easy to forget that on a messageboard Sturgeon's Law applies more precisely than anywhere else. I'll be cruising along, looking for sweet deals on Dura-Ace high flange track hubs, and then someone will suggest that Q and A is a really really great show and I'll be involved in some stupid flame war that keeps me tossing and turning at night, thinking of better and sharper rebuttals. On top of the time I'm wasting, that's a lot of emotional energy, spent building something out of nothing.

So I try to quit. And for the most part it's alright. But when there's five minutes to spare at work - when I have a bite sized chunk of free time, not quite enough to read a whole article on cyclingnews, but enough time to sit down at the computer and sink into the my own world for a while, there's not much more suited. In my moment of need I'm turning to you folks. I don't do Sudoku, can't stand crosswords, have already read the comics in the Herald-Sun. So when I have a tiny window of time, what should I do? What do you do?