A Distant Soil by Colleen Doran

Sorry to be offline the last day or so, but we had some minor excitement.

Our brand new, very expensive dryer machine from Sears went home to Jesus. After more than a month waiting for part and repairs, we finally got a guy out here to fix it. The minute he fiddled with our power outlet, nice little blue lights began arcing out of the wall.

Now, for some time, we’ve been smelling burning smells around the downstairs area. Not long ago, I spent an anxious evening sniffing all around my computer and laundry room trying to pinpoint the problem. I smelled something like burning rubber, only sharper. Could not see any smoke.

Turns out we’ve had an electrical problem behind the wall for awhile that just never leapt into flame, but melted the area behind the wall. Close call on that one. Could have sent the house up at any time.

Very grateful this has been taken care of, and if the dryer hadn’t gone out, we might not have found it until it was too late.

Obviously, we’ll have the nice electrical service dude in here doing some more work, so excuse me if I don’t get back to you immediately with emails and so on. I shouldn’t be incommunicado for more than a day at a time.

Also, thanks to the kind suggestion of tyg on this post I tried Self Control for MAC. Wow, that thing works. Unlike Freedom and Leechblock, I can’t disable it. It keeps running even after the power has been off for eight hours! You turn your computer back on, and that timer is still ticking away.

The copy of the program I downloaded from the developer’s website did not work, but the one I downloaded from MacUpdate did.

I’ve tried other programs before with limited success. Leechblock is a timer for Firefox that blocks you from websites when you go over your time limit. Fine, except all you need to do is open another browser and you’re around it. I also found it a little buggy.

Freedom blocks the entire internet. When I need to get an important email from a client or need to upload a file, I can’t be off the internet all day. I just need to be off time sink websites that are fun and great if you have the self control not to look at the cute kitties for more than five minutes. Also, it is super easy to disable. Just turn off the computer.

Self Control lets you program websites you do not want to look at and set a timer to block them. Say I want to tweet in the morning, but really need to get to the drawing board and work like an adult for the next six hours. So, I set it for six hours, and that is it. I can do other things I need to do, but I can’t get back to twitter for six hours. I can’t disable it, either. Also, while I am on the net, let’s say I see some time sink of an article with lots of commentary. OMG, my self control! I have none! So I just hit a button on my Self Control program and it lets me add that website to all the ones I am blocking already. For whatever time I have left running on my clock, that one is blocked, too.

The developer’s website is HERE. He has PC versions of the program, as well as links to other online control programs you may want to try, free and commercial use options.

If I am still using this thing a month from now and haven’t figured out how to disable it or simply stopped using it altogether, I’ll drop the guy a nice tip. So far, so good.

A warning: for some reason, the nice gentleman who created Self Control decided to create a pirate head in an Ace of Spades icon for his symbol. This thing pops up on your desktop after you download it, and you faint. It looks as if you’ve just acquired something that will eat your computer. While it does not eat your computer, you will have to reframe the image to mean something helpful like “Your life is being sucked away and your lack of self control is eating your brain, so use this program!”