Andrew Sullivan posted an excerpt from this article, which tries to put into perspective how much time people really have available:

"...if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation."

I'm of course typing this while watching Deadliest Catch (which rules), and would be useless without an hour or two of downtime every night, but the analysis above puts the phrase "if only there was more time available" into perspective.

This month's big event was a fishing trip in Santa Barbara with Aaron's (potential) Fall MBA class. We got a hotel room the night before, and after a crazy day of work I arrived late and exhaused to an empty room. Aaron and one of his co-workers showed up shortly thereafter, suffering the effects of a night on the town. The wisdom of going big the night before heading out on the water revealed itself the following morning - after an hour of exhaltation on the water, Aaron heaved over the side and spent the rest of the trip shivering in the fetal position when he wasn't tossing cookies in the head.

For my part I decided not to fish - I'd never been ocean fishing before and was a bit disillusioned with the process. The captain would steer the boat over a rock, check his fishfinder, announce about how many fish were on the bottom, and then everyone would drop a line and wait about a minute for a bite. If nothing bit in that time they moved on. Making matters worse, the rock fish we were fishing for apparently didn't handle changes in depth very well, and as they were pulled up the decompression caused their brains to explode and their eyes to bug out of their heads - it was a bunch of catatonic, bug-eyed snapper that came on deck.

Despite the puke and the fish massacre, the trip was a lot of fun. Two gray whales met us on the way out to sea, several sea lions made appearances, and there were tons of birds around the Channel Islands. The weather was sunny, and while cold it was awesome being out in the wind on the water. After getting back to land we saw two men with a mouse that was standing on a cat that was in turn standing on a dog in downtown Santa Barbara, ate a delicious meal at Chipotle, and then caught a showing of the heartwarming and very funny (yet overly weiner-revealing) flick Forgetting Sarah Marshall.