Dallas, Blogs and Laundry

Just recently my 11-year-old daughter figured out my secret guilty pleasure, watching Dallas on DVD, and reading blogs while doing laundry. It’s an interesting mix, watching a show that relies on the fact that things will change every week and we will watch, believe, and invest our time in the characters and the situations. They are glamorous, beautiful, and fun, but we only get out of it what we put into it, and make connections to our lives. It is entertainment and that is why I enjoy it. I can escape from the sometimes mundane, real world for a little while and simply enjoy. (Not that this is an advertisement for the show Dallas, because it was cheesy, over-teased, not based in reality, and shoulder-padded, but that is the definition of entertainment isn’t it?)

Wait for it, here’s the connection to technology….Some blogs are the same way. In fact most web 2.0 sites are like just like this. They are just for entertainment. I find myself completely enjoying the process of discovering new web 2.0 applications, games, social networking sites, and other great “stuff” on the internet. I love to play with them, and if truth be told, I probably have a free account for most of them while I was test driving them to see how they worked. However, they are like Dallas. A lot of them are just fads, they look good for the first few times you watch, but then they turn out like most other episodes/sites. They won’t be around in a few years, or they will be a paid service and you lose your stuff. They have a lot of flashy things in them, they look good, but they aren’t really that useful for the actual classroom. We get caught up in them, and before we realize it we are wasting a lot of valuable time trying to find the usefulness in them.

So my advice, like “old J.R.” used to say when trying out a new plan, “this is only the first of many steps to my plan, darling, wait and see, wait and see.”

Now do you see why I love to read blogs and watch Dallas while doing laundry? It gives me great ideas like this! However, my internet is down and I am crippled, so I will have to post this later, after the next episode, the next blog reading, and the load of socks to match. If the Internet doesn’t come back up soon, how am I going to get my laundry done?