Over the weekend, “Speaking Freely,” an apparently technologically-oriented blog, posted an entry titled “Five Things To Do With A PC When You Have No Internet Connection.” The article was picked up by a couple of tech-related news portals, and thus the link was spread across the Internet. For those who didn’t have the pleasure, here’s the condensed version of the list.

01. Clean out and categorize your Internet bookmarks.
02. Delete programs you don’t use.
03. Unplug your PC, take the cover off and clean out the dust.
04. Write your next blog post.
05. Run any maintenance programs you don’t have auto-scheduled.
06. Write down your logins and passwords for all your sites, blogs, email accounts, etc.

(Number was a bonus addition. A freebie, from “Speaking Freely” to you.)

Those of you who think of “old school computing” as “dial-up Internet access” may be shocked by this, but there was a horrible, dark time in history where some of us used computers with *gasp* NO Internet connection at all. Shocking, I know. I used home computers for fifteen years before the World Wide Web popped up.

The reason I mention these things is because three of the six items on Speaking Freely’s list (numbers one, four, and six) are related to the Internet. As a guy who spent a decade and a half behind a keyboard pre-Interneto, it is amazing to me that someone couldn’t come up with five things to do with a computer that aren’t related to the Internet.

Whatever happend to playing games? Or drawing, or writing? You could listen to music, or god forbid, create some! Who doesn’t have a hundred (or a thousand) digital photos that could use sorting, reorganizing and captioning? I could come up with five things (and probably five hundred things) to do with Microsoft Office alone without Internet access, from creating a database to keep track of my record collection to making an Excel spreadsheet to help keep track of my diet, calories, and exercise routine. With my recent acquisition of tens of thousands of e-books, I could always read a book — or write another one.

Of course the simplest suggestion is probably, the next time you don’t have an Internet connection, walk away from the computer for a bit.