Temptation Blocker by WebJillion

A few people out there complained about some of the games listed in last weeks “Impediment to Productivity”. They were complaining that they had been playing for just a while longer than was good for “productivity”, it was Thursday. Evidently the cute little claymation character, with the coloured blocks, brick walls and dynamite had sucked them in.

First, have you read the title to the email? Doesn’t it sort of convey a quaint “Abandon Hope All Who Enter Here” quality. I rather thought it did?

Second and more importantly, Technology giveth and technology taketh away. (God I have speech impediment now on top of vague spelling skills) .

A small digression is warranted here. Years and Years ago, Jools and I went to see the late Douglas Adams at an Age literary lunch. He was wonderful. Smoked like a chimney ( that’s how long ago it was… you could still smoke inside at a lunch) and in the course of his chat mentioned that he found writing so hard he would bribe himself with peanut butter sandwiches as soon as he finished a really good paragraph.

So here to save you from yourself is a technological peanut butter sandwich called
Temptation Blocker

This program allows you to block certain programs, say… let’s pick on totally of the top my head… oh this is so hard… lets call it Solitaire , for a set amount of time. So this is like Douggie’s peanut butter sandwich. In 30 minutes you can play a game of Solitaire. When you lose, reset the timer and you cant play another game for say another 30 minutes.

So next time you have a major deadline looming and just don’t have time to waste playing Solitaire or checking Thatchspace, add Solitaire and Firefox to the list of programs you want to block in Temptation Blocker, set the timer for how long you want to block them and then hit the “Get Work Done!” button.

Now, everytime you try and access Solitaire or Firefox, you’ll get a dialog box telling you how much time you have left before you can access that program. During this blocked time, you can’t access those programs. You also can’t access Temptation Blocker during this time without entering in a random, 32-character string. This acts as a deterrent from you getting to your program before time is up, but it also let’s you access it if you really need to. (Note: During the blocked time, your Windows Task Manager is also disabled, in an attempt to save your from yourself and a quick Ctrl-Alt-Del. If you don’t like that idea, then you probably shouldn’t download the software and remain impeded).

Cool huh? Thanks heaps B. Adam Howell and you really do make cool stuff.

Update: Vague spelling fixed (I hope).