I am a recovering TV addict that is now suddenly able to watch TV online. Help me work through my resurfaced addiction.

August 26, 2008 12:38 PM

I am addicted to TV. I struggled for years to limit my intake. Finally about 8 years ago, I gave my TV away. Success! Huzza! Lately I have been watching TV online. I have also been wasting time online. I have even been onlining online.

So here is my goal. I would like to not have internet access from home. The problem is my wife needs internet access for her iBook for her home based business (she doesn't need flash).

Right now we have city-wide wifi (which costs $25 a month).

---------------------------------------------

1. Buy her a laptop wireless card from Verizon or something like that. It will be fast enough to send emails & work but slow enough to make watching TV impossible.

2. Keep the internet access as is and have her lock up her computer before I get home and promise not to pull it out or give me the key (I did mention this was an addiction, right?).

3. Have her buy a smaller laptop like device that will allow a web browsing but not flash. An iPhone wouldn't work because it doesn't have the keyboard but something like that might.

advice, other options?

posted by rdurbin to Computers & Internet (15 answers total)

Best answer: work but slow enough to make watching TV impossible.

That's not true. I've watched video on a sprint EVDO card before. It works pretty well.

Option 2 sounds the best.
posted by damn dirty ape at 12:47 PM on August 26, 2008

Perhaps address your addiction issues rather than hobble your wife's business computer. I mean, the "solution" here isn't gonna be a technological one.
posted by gyusan at 12:52 PM on August 26, 2008 [18 favorites]

Seconding addressing the source (addictive tendencies) rather than the symptom.
posted by tybeet at 12:54 PM on August 26, 2008

4. Watch TV and be happy.
posted by Fairchild at 12:59 PM on August 26, 2008 [5 favorites]

What gyusan and tybeet said. Seriously, giving away your TV was putting a band-aid on your addiction issue. Now you're contemplating impairing your wife's ability to do work efficiently at home?

Get help. Get help from a cognitive behavioral therapist.

Removing things from the path of an addiction is not treating the addiction.

Please notice that all of the "solutions" you propose have HER changing her behavior, not YOU changing your behavior. This is pretty standard addiction-think right there.
posted by Sidhedevil at 1:05 PM on August 26, 2008 [16 favorites]

I don't really know much about this, but I suspect that you could get something like "Net Nanny" and set it up so that (A) the default is no access to the internet, and (B) only your wife knows the password to get past that default.
posted by Flunkie at 1:37 PM on August 26, 2008

Best answer: Does your wife have a cellphone? Get a data plan and tether the cellphone to the laptop. Cancel all the other plans. Then she can only surf when she has her cellphone with her laptop. Without the cellphone you can't do anything.
posted by blue_beetle at 2:17 PM on August 26, 2008

have her lock up her computer

There´s this new thing called a ¨password¨ for keeping unauthorized users off her machine, you might try that.
posted by yohko at 2:55 PM on August 26, 2008

Make your wife responsible for your internet use and you're going to have a marriage full of resentment. I've been down this road. Nothing and no one can do this for you. Your problem is not her responsibility.
posted by desjardins at 3:07 PM on August 26, 2008 [5 favorites]

You can find a proxy server hosted in another country and try to route your computer through that and most of the (legal) TV viewing sites that I know of restrict their viewers to US audiences only.
posted by davidstandaford at 3:11 PM on August 26, 2008

I've struggled with similar time-wasting issues, and what helped a lot (although it didn't fix the problem 100%) was installing K-9 Web Protection on my computer. It's free, and it allows me to enter both a whitelist (of sites which are allowed at all times) and a blacklist (of sites which are always blocked), as well as a more general list of optional blocked categories ("Humor", "Arts and Entertainment", etc).

Since 90% of my time-wasting took place on the same 50 or so sites, I just blacklisted every useless site I could think of, had my husband set the password (without telling me), and voila! no more access to all those time-sucking back episodes of House, MD. K-9 even offers the option of blocking anonymizers/proxies, so there's no danger of getting too clever for your own good. And it's very fast and easy to block/unblock sites if you have the password, so your wife shouldn't find it an undue burden on her computer usage. I'd highly recommend it-- definitely the best thing I've done for myself in the past year or so. Now, if I could only work up the resolution to block Mefi...
posted by Bardolph at 4:10 PM on August 26, 2008

I'm also one of those who is wondering why you want to cripple your wife's computer because of your addiction. The problem isn't hers, so why should she have to suffer for it?

There's this concept called personal responsibility...
posted by Zarya at 4:13 PM on August 26, 2008 [2 favorites]

I'm not entirely sure why you're viewing watching any TV as an addiction. If you're really not getting the stuff that you need to do done because of it, then everyone who suggested addressing the addiction issue through therapy was right on. But if you're still getting other stuff done fine, why not watch television? It's entertaining, informative, and will let you converse with normal people without looking like a non-tv watching mutant.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 6:46 PM on August 26, 2008

Harsh answers -- if I was married to someone with an internet addiction, I'd be willing to do some of these simple solutions, like log in to my computer using a password, if it helped them. Nobody's head is perfect, and figuring out the work-around is a decent backup plan (ideally while dealing with the other issues). I mean, don't you guys know others who don't get internet at home because they'll waste more time than they want to?

Anyway, the simplest idea seems to be to lock you out of her computer entirely with a password. You could look at Temptation Blocker, though Flunkie's is probably slightly better. Some wireless routers can be turned off and on and be password-limited.

But I think in addiction terminology, you might be in the "white knuckle" phase of things, so dealing with the underlying issues might be smart. (Skim down on that link to the Alcoholics Anonymous definition.)
posted by salvia at 10:33 PM on August 26, 2008

Well, we see which answer rdurbin picked. rdurbin, I hope that if you do that, you're doing that as a temporary workaround and that you GET HELP right away, because you need to fix the addiction problem, not just a series of access problems.

Giving your TV away didn't cure your addiction problem and neither will this.
posted by Sidhedevil at 7:58 AM on August 27, 2008