I almost always consider technology an improvement to my life. But sometimes it can be downright annoying.

Take the Olympics for example. Because of the time difference between Indianapolis and Beijing, many of the events have already been completed before they air on the U.S. networks. 20 years ago, this wasn't a big deal. You just made sure you didn't watch the news so that you could pretend any event you were watching was actually live.
Fast forward to 2008. In order to not get the results spoiled for any event I am interested in watching I have to ignore the following:

1. My iGoogle home page which features top breaking news stories like Michael Phelps breaking a world record and winning another gold medal
2. Email news alerts from CNN.com, daily morning news summaries and casual emails from friends who just happen to mention "I can't believe the U.S. won the gold in the [insert event name here] event!" just after talking about what their plans are for the upcoming weekend
3. Social network postings from any of my friends on MySpace, Facebook, Plaxo, FriendFeed and half a dozen others
4. Micro-blog updates from my Twitter friends on the web or in my TweetDeck client
5. Text messages on my mobile phone, including automatic updates from my closest Twitter friends (see above)
6. Instant messages from friends on Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo and Google Chat
7. RSS feeds in my Google Reader laden with Olympic event spoilers
8. Desktop widgets on my computer always displaying the latest news coverage or most popular Digg items
9. News on any television network not broadcasting Olympic coverage
10. Face to face or telephone conversations with anyone not doing any of the above

I'm a die-hard techie. What do you think the odds are that I can ignore the above list during live Olympic events for the next two weeks?