Things to Do at Home Without Internet
Posted by Jon Lee in Personal, tags: book, comic, gaming
Having not have Internet access for the past couple days, I had to find other means to keep myself busy. Now I could have gone outdoors but it has been about 35 degrees celsius (95 F) and quite humid so I had opted to stay indoors.
After a couple hours of unsuccessfully searching for available wireless networks in the area, I sat down and wrote a list of things around the house that needed to be done as well as things that I had wanted to do.
I ended up accomplishing the following in 3 days:
- Cleaned the Whole House
It is a dreaded chore but when I did everything at once I managed to get everything done in less than two hours. That includes mopping, vacuuming, sweeping, scrubbing and general tidying up. 
Read the Fifth book of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Interestingly, I had read the first four books in two weeks but it has taken me over 3 months to finish the fifth book. Not that it isn’t a good book but other things kept on coming up. All in all, a great science fiction series. The second best one I’ve read next to Orson Scott Card’s Ender series.- Read the Sandman Comic series
I’m not a big comic book fan but the Sandman series (by Vertigo, not Marvel) was recommended to me by a friend and he lent me all the comics (over 60 issues). I must say, the story is very good but very dark. I only read up to issue 35 but it was a good time killer. 
Read a Textbook
I had a statistical data mining textbook that I bought a while ago but had not read past the first chapter. I got through over half the book and skimmed the rest (it got kind of boring).- Learned a Couple New Programs
I went through the built-in tutorials for Flash 8 and MATLAB (math software). I’ve used both before but I never had any official training in either of these pieces of software. I refreshed a lot of existing knowledge and learned quite a few things I didn’t know before. - Played Offline Games
Of course, I didn’t just read and work all the time. I had several freeware games on hand for occasions like this to help me kill time. I found that they had high replay value and are simple yet addicting. The games were:
As you can see, most of what I did is what I usually do on the Internet anyways: read, learn and play games. The only difference was I had to make use of existing material around the house.
It’s amazing how much it appears I (and society) have become dependent on the Internet. What would you do if you didn’t have Internet for a week?
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