Off grid, under the radar

Vacation took me off grid, and the Winter Olympics in Vancouver has forced me under the radar.

In other words, I was disconnected from the news and from the Internet, a curious combination since my retirement income depends on access to news and the Internet.

And you know what ... I've survived.

The vacation took me to northern New Hampshire for skiing with family. And my intent was to carve out time to work. I packed my laptop along with my skis, boots and poles. I packed my Verizon-supplied portable network WiFi along with my long underwear and socks.

I got plenty of use out of the ski gear. I didn't crack open the laptop or fire up the WiFi card once.

As a contract writer and blogger, there are no defined vacations as there were when I went to an office every day and scheduled my vacation days and weeks along with everybody else in the facility. My obligations these days are to the deadlines of the people who contract me to write.

But retirement gave me the chance to re-engineer myself by working for myself.

In that respect I planned to mix business with pleasure, but we crammed in so much pleasure -- basically skiing, eating and sleeping -- that I didn't leave time for anything else, and a vacation became all pleasure and no business.

Since some of my work involves keeping up with what's going on in the world, the fact that I was off grid helped keep me totally unaware of what was going on with the Olympics in Vancouver until we paused after dinner to watch the primetime coverage on NBC.

It became a little more difficult when I got home. I didn't have skiing to fill my day. I've been working but staying enough under the radar to be pretty much unaware of results in Vancouver.

As I write this, for example, I have forced myself to be blissfully unaware of Lindsey Vonn's results earlier today in the Olympics giant slalom event until I see the coverage later today.

That means I've avoided all the news sites I normally cruise both on the web with my laptop and my BlackBerry. I have to turn away from the television news and keep my car radio tuned away from NPR during the news hours.

But there have been occasional violations of the cone of the silence. Twice this week, despite my best attempts to cruise the web and do my job with Olympic blinders on, I stumbled on results of Bode Miller races before actually seeing the races later that night.

Frankly, it's the ludicrous coverage by NBC and its affiliates that forces me to such ridiculous machinations. NBC insists on tape-delayed coverage of certain events that, in my estimation, could have been aired live.

Sunday's men's alpine super combined event on Sunday is an example. Why couldn't I have seen Bode Miller win his gold medal live on Sunday afternoon, rather than wait until the taped coverage later that night?

As fun as it was to be unplugged for a while, it'll be a lot easier -- and I'll be a lot less anxious -- once I'm plugged back in.

Residing in the virtual land of Facebook

I'm not a very good citizen of Facebook.

There are the people who are very active; then there's me. There are people who have a lot to say -- sometimes too much to say; then there's me. There are people who get charged up about every little thing that's going on in Facebook nation; then there's me.

I guess the virtual world there at Facebook is like the real work here. I don't get too worked up one way or the other about the whole thing.

A lot of my tribe -- as in Baby Boomers -- are venturing into the virtual world of Facebook. In lieu of face-to-face visits or phone calls or letters or even email, it's a good way to be connected to family and friends. The updates give me a sense of who's doing what.

According to a recent statistic that was part of a technology post on USA Today's web site, 47 percent of Baby Boomers are active in social media and nearly three quarters of those social media activists have a Facebook account. Only 13 percent used Twitter.

As a self-employed writer for the web (we're called content producers) I'm active on the business side of Facebook with my Broad Cove Media page.

But I'm not so active on my personal Facebook page. I'm just an Average Joe.

It may be because I'm as confused about the Facebook world as I am about the real world sometimes. I just can't figure it out. I don't understand why certain people do what they do.

I kind of hang out at the edges (I'm a lurker, I think I'm called) and watch as the Facebook world spins around.

I don't get involved in the games that people play -- the Mafia Wars, for example. I didn't get involved in Doppeldanger Week when you were supposed to substitute your profile photo with the famous person who could be your twin.

I didn't bother with the 25 facts about myself and Urban Dictionary Week. I don't get too charged up everytime Facebook reorganizes everyone's page layout, which seems quite often.

At one point, the women with whom I'm friends on Facebook were writing comments with a color: purple or pink or black. It was totally lost on me. It wasn't until weeks later did I find out that women posted the color of the bra they were currently wearing to support breast-cancer awareness. Go figure.

"Lost" describes more than a confusing TV show. It can describe my life on Facebook.

The most telling portrait of the Facebook world came from my 22-year-old son David who was a Facebook user long before his old man.

His account was recently hacked; spam and links to potential sites with viruses were being posted in his name to his friends. So he deleted the account. He blew up his Facebook world. Frankly, he said, he doesn't miss it.

If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, would I miss it? Not really. I'm happy to be bopping along here in the real world.