After thinking and talking about it for years now, I've finally gone ahead and cut myself off from all but the the tiniest sliver of the Internet. I used the parental controls included in the latest version of Mac OS X to restrict myself to a handful of specified sites that I find genuinely valuable. Hopefully, this will keep me from wasting any more hours and days of my life surfing aimlessly from site to site they way I used to.

So far it seems to be working pretty well. At least I haven't gone on any internet binges since yesterday, when I installed it, and any time I've felt like doing so, just having to enter my administrator password ('lifeisshort') has been enough to quell the impulse.

Not that there aren't still a few kinks to be worked out. Having parental controls active seems to be making it impossible for me to change my homepage or manage my bookmarks, and for some reason it's stopped Azureus from functioning as well. Still, as a price for getting my internet habit back under control, I'd say it's worth it.