I never really thought I had a problem, I mean, I thought I could stop any time I wanted to. I’m young, healthy and have a variety of other interests and hobbies. It’s not like I NEED to log on.

And then it happened… this weekend as I’m lazily checking my Gmail account and downloading the trailer for X-Men 3 and suddenly I’m inundated with error messages from both Firefox and my operating system. I’M OFF THE GRID!!!

Due to some home network IP tomfoolery I was rudely booted from my only link to the outside world (or at least the un-showered-still-in-my-PJs-at-4-in-the-afternoon-on-a-Sunday version of me).

“Oh well,” I told myself. “No biggie, I’ve got some other stuff I needed to do anyway.” The next hour was excruciating! Within the first 15 minutes I thought about looking up something real quick, remembered I had no way of getting to Wikipedia. Thought about playing some video games but then World of Warcraft don’t work so well with no connection. My compass was spinning around wildly and I had nowhere to turn.

Then I realized, the web, in all it’s glory, had already provided the solution for my dire situation: Podcasts.

Who knew my savior today and one of the things that’s been most exciting to me about the current wired world would be that old standby medium: radio?

I turned to my iTunes and thankfully there was a whole cache of “back episode” shows I’d never gotten around to listening to.

Now my interests tend towards the geekier end of the spectrum but if you’ve got an interest in anything, no matter how obscure, there’s probably someone else out there that is more into it and most likely recording their ramblings and distributing them online. For free.

First I entered into the black with a little Firefly Talk and The Signal. Then I checked in with the nerdlingers at GeeksOn and Geekdrome. I picked up on the latest tech news with the gang from TWIT, then I kicked back for some laughs with what might be the greatest “real world” radio show EVER Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. (Giant sloppy kisses to NPR for finally releasing this, I always manage to sleep through it on Saturday mornings. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a podcast version of This American Life as well.)

Crisis averted, but it did make me think I should maybe get away from the computer every once in a while. It has been a while since I re-organized the comic books…

Last week I discussed a few great web sites that help us get our hectic lives together and help eek out a few more of those precious leisure-time minutes. So what do you do now that you’ve got all this free time piled up? Well of course we turn back to the web to utilize it’s primary purpose: being a colossal time waster!

Now one could just aimlessly surf around at random and take out a good hour or two easy, but the results can be pretty hit or miss. The web is so bloated with cat pictures and message board trolls that can almost put you off the whole mess. But there be gold in them thar hills and what we’re looking for is the mother-lode: sites that entertain, amaze and maybe even enlighten.

So here are a few of my first stops when I’ve got piles of work nothing better to do.

Geek News

Need to know about cutting-edge tech stories and news for nerds? There really is no better place to go than Slashdot or Digg. While there is a bit of story repetition between the two sites, the breadth of information available is pretty vast (in a narrow, geek-focused kind of way). Warning: reading comment threads on either site may cause loss of all faith in humanity.

On the less tech-specific side lies Boing Boing. 90% of every link I’m sent or read about was probably first posted here. Weird, funny, poignant, frightening, there’s a little bit of it all to be found here. Pretty much required reading (but you probably knew that already).

Web Design

Whether you’re a standards noob or a seasoned css ninja, CSS Beauty is an invaluable resource. It acts as both a showcase of what can be done with standards based web construction and as a resource for how-toos and articles related to CSS design. On a related note: CSS Zen Garden is a wonderful site for design inspiration as well as perfect example of the flexibility you get with style sheets.

Brain Power

In the last couple of weeks I’ve tried to give up Googling if I’m trying to find answers to life’s questions or trying to find out more information on a subject. Now I turn to the Wikipedia. Articles are valuable, fairly accurate and hyper-linked out the wazoo so expanding your knowledge is just a click away. I’ve especially found it an invaluable resource in boning up on obscure comic book characters. It also appears that someone has figured out how to get the whole thing onto an iPod which is probably as close as we’re gonna get at the moment to a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

I figure everyone knows about the Internet Movie Database but maybe lesser known is its music world ugly stepsister All Music. Find out what album that hot new pop single is from, learn more about artists, what other groups they’ve worked with or influenced, or just read the (for me at least) pretty spot on album reviews. Not the easiest site to use and a redesign about a year ago was a bit of a bad flashback to www 1997 but the content keeps bringing me back.

So get out there and get unproductive, just don’t let the boss see you…