Wasting our time?

"All these tools of technology let us waste our time if we are not careful", says Bill Gates, who has deleted his Facebook account due to overwhelming response from millions of people worldwide who wanted to be his Facebook "friend". I found the statement so ironic coming from (one of) the world's richest man who earned his billions from technology. Well, unless Facebook is bought over /owned by Microsoft, then maybe it will be a different story...

In a way, thanks to Bill Gates, it is true we have become slaves of technology. We cannot live without our PCs / mobile phones / because we feel we NEED to be online all the time. We feel withdrawal symptoms if we do not check emails regularly, if we do not chat on MSN with friends, if we do not check our Facebook status, if we do not check our Tweets, if we do not surf the net, if we do not blog.... etc... lots of “if”.

These few weeks, I have been having some problems with my laptop, first it was virus or spyware which resulted in me having funny intermittent problems. Once resolved, other problems appeared. Worse thing is, different problems popped up at different times. When it was fixed, another problem came up and the vicious cycle goes on and on. I tried changing from IE to Mozilla Firefox browsers, I tried changing back. Now my keyboard is behaving weirdly because it can “gostan” (go backwards) or the cursor can suddenly jumped somewhere else, or my characters can suddenly disappear (this post is making me lose my patience, having to type and retype). I almost threw away the laptop! I decided to send my laptop for servicing for now.

However, I still and even have problem blogging now. I thought my weird laptop was the culprit, so I used another netbook to login to Blogger. The same problem persisted as the text box in Blogger just went missing, so I can’t upload pictures, I can’t save an entry, I can’t blog!!! And it's not that I have ran out of space allocated by Blogger. I cannot save my entry in Draft but I can publish it directly (so no editing at all). Last night miraculously I can post again, so that was my last entry. This morning again cannot. This has been going on for few weeks. Can. Cannot. Can. Cannot. Can. Cannot. I have written to Blogger many times (NO RESPONSE) and those automated Help solutions don’t help either! So I am exasperated.

I have been blogging close to 5 years. I started off just like any bright eyed kid new to the whole new world of blogging, the whole new world of the new media social media, embracing technology and loving it. It started just as a diary, just writing about the little things happening around me I observed as an outlet for expressing my thoughts (well, maybe not my private private thoughts) but I try to be as earnest as I could be through my observation /experiences. There was no particular theme I wanted to focus on or adhere to..... not just on food..... not just on people.... not just about my job... not just on religion..... not just on new consumer products.... not on technology (I am not that tech savvy), but rather, just a mishmash of everything I get in touch with and exposed to.

Bottomline is, I love to write. Did not care even if I have no reader. Did not care even if there is no advertising sponsor. Did not care even if people don't agree with what I write. Did not care what other bloggers are writing. I still continue to write because that is my passion (although sometimes I may have writer's block). And sometimes I want to rattle off lots of rantings about certain things or people, but mostly I stopped myself from doing that. I tried to go for balance. It's my personal blog anyway. I can write whatever I like with no constraints. And ultimately what makes me happy.

But it has also made me a slave to blogging, I think. Because not being able to blog properly now is making me unhappy. Blogger has a lot of explaining to do to me but they are not responding at all (how great a service provider is that?). Now I am thinking of changing to Wordpress instead soon...