The XX Factor: What women really think.

Desperately Seeking Freedom

I'm desperately seeking Freedom, but didn't know it existed until I read Rebecca Traister on the new software application by that name devised by Fred Stutzman, a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. It blocks your computer's networking capacities, evidently for as little as a minute or as much as eight hours. A godsend for us online workers/addicts (is there a distinction?), or some of us anyway, if my fruitless efforts to fend off the endless distractions of the internet are any guide.

But it's available for use only on Macs. I have a dumb old Dell (and this isn't the season, alas, for an upgrade). Help! So far of the 10,000 people who have downloaded Freedom, 50 have responded to Stutzman's request for donations. I don't want to flood the poor guy's inbox, but non-Apple-users of the world, unite! Let's email him-- fred@fredstutzman.com--and see if donations from us might be used for developing a non-Mac version. Worst is, we've wasted a little bit of time before embarking on "real" work this morning. I don't know about you, but despite my vows to get down to uninterrupted writing at 8 a.m., I would have been noodling around anyway-and this, or so I'm telling myself, has been all in the cause of future improvements in discipline.