Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Wake up! Wake up! I'm bored!

I'm having time zone issues.

Or rather, I'm waiting for the internet to do something interesting, and it just isn't. Doing. Anything interesting.

My hypothesis is that everyone in exciting Northern Latitude Cities is asleep. Which is clearly something they only do to spite me.

I've just been examining everyone's time zones courtesy of the meeting planner on this site to try and understand why I am plagued by this dry spell most evenings.

I tend to read blogs first thing in the morning, and then again when I get home at night. When I get up at 7 o'clock, it's early to mid afternoon for the USAliens among you, so I can read whatever you've written the previous evening, that morning or in your lunch break. The Europeans are just going to bed, so I get their whole day's worth of bloggy goodness in one big helping that goes nicely with my porridge.

Often, like today, I cheat and look at Bloglines over lunch. In that case I read any evening posts by the Americans on my list then, and when I get home at six or seven o'clock it's the middle of the night for that lot, and early morning for the Eurolites*. The blogging world really doesn't start bubbling away again until well past my bedtime.

Two possible solutions occur to me. The first is that I should stop reading blogs at lunchtime and save them up for the evening when I'm more likely to be at a loose end. The second is that I could expand my bloglines feeds to include people who might actually write something between midnight and 7 am EST or 5 am and noon BST.

So since the first option isn't going to happen any time soon, does anyone know of any good blogs by European early risers or American insomniacs?

____________
* Which sounds like a new type of snack food. Eurolites! They taste like your Standard Average European**, but now with less fat!

** That was a linguistics joke.***

*** Except for the whole not-being-funny thing. So not actually a joke at all.

9 Comments:

Lucy said...

I think you need some middle eastern/indian bloggers. I have the same problem in the morning because most people are asleep while I am. It only took me 15 minutes to read my blogs this morning - that's not long enough for me to be ready to get up yet. Hence, I'm wasting time looking for more things to read when I should be leaving.

StyleyGeek said...

Do you have some I could borrow? I promise to give them back in good condition.

Unknown said...

Are there no aussie or NZ bloggers (other than you, of course)?

My other solutions are these:
1. change to US time. This would serve a dual purpose - since you'd be at work while all aussie's are at sleep, you would never have to have a meeting and would have no walk ins.

2. move to the US.

Nicola said...

My favourite Middle East blog is Riverbend's - oh, and she won a Bloggie for it, too.

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

The early archives (which give a lot of context) are really worth reading. If you only read the late ones, you lose sight of the fact that this is a computer geek who used to go to work lugging a backpack that "even Bill Gates would be proud of", or words to that effect.

StyleyGeek said...

What morton t fogg says.

I found one NZ blog I really liked once, but for some reason didn't bookmark it, or deleted the bookmark or something, and I can't remember enough about it to find it again. Plus reading NZ blogs makes me homesick.

I haven't experimented much with Aussie blogs. Mostly I like reading academic blogs, and I'm not sure how many Aussie ones there are of those.

Jana -- thanks for that suggestion. I had forgotten about Riverbend. Lots of people have recommended her to me, so I should probably go take a look.

And shrinky, thanks for your extremely practical solutions :)

Lucy said...

I don't have any middle eastern or indian bloggers, sorry, but do you already read galaxy (galaxyofemptiness.blogspot.com/) or Lucy Tartan (http://allordinary2.blogspot.com/)'s blogs? They're my other favourite Australian ones and they're academics. I haven't explored their blogrolls too much (I have no idea why not, maybe I should do that now...), but they might have some other cool friends. presentsimple.blogspot.com/ belongs to an NZer in Japan who writes cool stories about the birds and things she photographs, so that mightn't make you too homesick.

Unknown said...

wait, what? Are you implying my suggestions were not feasible? I thought my plan to live on US time had many many potential benefits.

harumpf.

Oh, by the way, I read something in a magazinne about someone from New Zealand. It was a guy - and he had a fiancee. Do you know him?

Psycgirl said...

mmmmmm eurolites.........

I don't have any super ideas here, i just like the sound of eurolites :)

StyleyGeek said...

Thanks, Lucy. I've added them to my bloglines feeds.

Shrinky, I take it all back. Your ideas were fantastic. Obviously my refusal to implement them is entirely due to me being a boring, conventional stick-in-the-mud.

And psycgirl, I've heard they come in new improved flavours too.