I'm doing a major purge for the first time in a really long time. The most recent purge was when I moved from Canada to California 13 years ago - I packed everything that would fit in my car (a Honda Prelude at the time) and left everything else at my parents' place. Come to think of it, that almost doesn't even count as being a purge.

When I moved from California to Texas, my employer paid for the movers so I just moved everything. Recently I've found boxes of magazines that I hadn't read and never will (they've been recycled now).

This time, with a move to the other side of the world in the works, I am finally discarding much of the stuff that has been slowly filling up my house. I've got the packrat gene from my grandfather (it skipped a generation in my mom) and I tend to keep useless stuff in a box just because I might need something like it someday. Of course, that never happens. I'm making pretty good use of the test, "If you haven't used it in the past year, get rid of it."

This is going fairly well. There is a small list of things that I really love that I want to take with me. Everything else, I can let go. (We are going to make a list of everything that's for sale and post it here, within the next few weeks.)

Finally, while emptying a box in my closet, I discovered my original diploma from the University of Victoria (may 1992), that I had lost and had convinced myself that it had been accidentally discarded. I thought I had torn the place up looking for that, but it was buried deep in a box. Yay!

I just caught up on four or five days of reading my LJ friends page. Seriously, where did I think I'd have enough time to keep up with all this stuff?

Recently I've reduced the number of RSS feeds I'm reading via LJ, by implementing a new periodic web bookmark system. Basically you add links, and a time period for each one, and it will present each link for you to click on according to the time period since you last clicked. More on that later.

Yesterday I had to spend some time dealing with DoS (Denial of Service) attacks against my hosted server. I think it was related to Tor, and I've changed my Tor configuration to hopefully eliminate that problem. More on that later too.

As usual, I have way more things I'd like to do, than I have time for. My todo list only grows. Perhaps I should publish some of it in LJ's todo list system so you can all appreciate my plight!

Amy and I leave for Peru in less than 48 hours. I'm really looking forward to that.

I seem to spend way too much time reading livejournal. A couple of months ago I decided to quit reading livejournal at work, because it was just sucking up too much time. I had one of those tray icon notifier things and it would let me know whenever a new post appeared on my friends list. Click, read, read links, maybe comment, close... it all added up quickly.

So I'm now reading my friends page in the morning and the evening. Yesterday I caught up in the morning but didn't have a chance to read it after work. I read the new posts today. Start time: 11:10am. Finish time: 12:25pm. That was over an hour for a bit over a day worth of posts. By the time I was done, there were 8 new posts to read.

Assuming I'm nominally awake for 16 hours per day, livejournal is sucking up 6.25% of my waking time. There are 112 waking hours in a week, minus say 50 hours work-related (travel, work, lunch) leaving 62 hours of "my" time per week. If I spend an hour per day reading livejournal, that's over 11% of my time spent reading about other people.

I've had a tendency to start reading journals or communities or rss feeds that even marginally interest me. Some of them are rather high volume (eg. linguaphiles averaged 10.7 posts per day in the month of feburary). With the number of other projects I want to and have to do, I just don't have time for this stuff.

It's time to cut the crap. Let the culling commence.

Many years ago, my dad (who is a mathematics professor) said that he once tried to read some Usenet newsgroups such as sci.math, but that there really wasn't any serious discussion taking place. It was mostly people who didn't know what they were talking about, posting for the sake of discussion. This was long before the public Internet, at a time when everybody with access to Usenet was posting from an educational institution of some kind.

I've seen this phenomenon in several places since then, as I've been involved in electronic communications for something like 15 years. Well, it just hit home again. I was reading a post in mathematics and the first two responses started out like this:

• I've never done number theory, so I can't quite get the precise words out, but...
• i'm just thinking out loud here, so this could be way off, but...

Now, I mean no disrespect to the participants involved, but it might be time for me to stop reading that community. The question was regarding square roots of integers, and once upon a time I probably knew how to answer the question, and I would be curious to find out the answer now, but an LJ community is probably not the right place to find that. Most likely somebody will post a definitive answer to the question, but to find that I will have to pay attention to that post and come back later to see if there are any more answers. This is probably not an effective use of my time.

This post might seem a bit grouchy, but really I'm just looking for ways to eliminate some of the noise from my online time. I find that I can easily blow a whole weekend afternoon surfing around reading stuff and chatting with people and that sort of thing. I've already unsubscribed from some mailing lists that I never read. Another place to look is my livejournal friends page.

I just hit Reload again and somebody posted a simple, correct answer to the problem. But I'm still going to unsubscribe.