Billionaire Larry Ellison bought the Hawaiian island of Lanai yesterday. Here’s what we got:

New reclining chairs. We got the old reclining sofa something like 12 years ago, and over time it has gotten uglier and uglier and more and more uncomfortable. The reclining mechanism broke on my side, and we had it repaired. This involved stripping all the upholstery off my half of it and leaving it occupying the living room for weeks like the Terminator’s skeleton.

Then a few months ago the mechanism on my side broke again, and I’ve been sitting without reclining, which is suffering exactly comparable to what my grandparents went through when they immigrated to America in steerage.

In the past couple of weeks the couch has gone from uncomfortable to downright painful to sit in. And it’s still ugly. We had pillows piled up to attempt to compensate for its comfort shortcomings, and duck tape holding the upholstery together. It’s like a torture device designed by drunk fratboys.

We couldn’t find a sofa we liked, so instead we got separate chairs. We agreed instantly that we did not want the kind with the motor-driven reclining mechanism, because (a) one more thing to break and (b) it’s a step too far down the road to becoming Wall-E people.

And now the chairs are here and they look good, and they’re filling the front of the house with new-leather smell. I can’t wait to get crumbs all over mine.

A new wallet. This isn’t a we-got, it’s an I-got. This is my third wallet from All-Ett They make a very slim wallet.

When I got my previous wallet from them I opened the envelope and said to myself, “Oh, crap, I got the wrong one.” I wanted their original, larger-size wallet, but instead I got the ultra-tiny model. I can’t remember why I kept that wallet – I think I talked myself into thinking it was better than the one I ordered, because that seemed like a better idea than exchanging the wallet for the one I actually wanted.

The other day, I said, “I’ve been carrying around this stupid wallet for 10 years. Time to just get the wallet I wanted in the first place.”

The primary difference between the two wallets is that the new wallet has an extra pocket to hold receipts and such.

Unfortunately, the new wallet arrived empty, which is a problem on account of buying those new chairs.

For the past six weeks or so, I’ve been working on two secret projects, which I called “The Secret Project” and “The Other Secret Project.” Because I’m all clever coming up with codenames and stuff.

They’re both Web sites, published by my wonderful employers, the DeusM business unit of United Business Media.

Educational IT is an online community for IT decision-makers in K–12 and higher education. It deals with using information technology in schools, including social media, Internet video, tablets, networks, PC deployment, and more. It deals with a broad range of subjects, some technical, some social and experimental. EdIT launched May 3. It’s sponsored by AMD.

Intelligent WAN is an online community for network engineers who build and maintain networks for organizations with multiple sites. It covers application optimization, application prioritization, perimeter security, MPLS IP networks and MPLS IP VPNs and more. Don’t worry if you don’t know what those things are; they’re very important to our community. iWAN launched Wednesday. It’s sponsored by XO Communications.

Both sites feature DeusM’s usual zesty mix of blogs, message boards, chats, white papers, and videos.

What happened to The CMO Site, you ask? Nothing. It’s right there, still the premier community for using technology for marketing.

So that means I’m editor-in-chief of three sites, which keeps me busy.

EdIT and iWAN are both looking for bloggers and community leaders. If you’re interested in becoming part of the community, drop me an email at work, wagner@deusm.com.

I just sent more-or-less the following in an email to a friend and colleague:

On a personal note: I’m impressed that you’re letting yourself go gray (you look great, btw), and are bragging about having professional experience since 1992. For the past couple of years, I’ve internalized advice about distracting people from my age. I listed my experience on LinkedIn as “more than 15 years” and I was careful to avoid pop culture references that might date me. Then a month or two ago I decided I didn’t want to be that guy anymore. I even made a Phil Donahue reference at a company all-hands meeting.

It helps that I’ve gotten fit. If some 25-year-old ectomorph wants to make wisecracks about my age, I can trounce him. Or if he proves tougher than he looks, I can run away and not get all winded and stuff.

My college paper used manual typewriters, and on my first job out of college, I worked for a newspaper that used a minicomputer-based system with 8″ floppy disks and greenscreens. Now I’m a social media professional. That’s not a liability, it’s my superpower.

I’m taking a break from my writing group, the Penny Dreadfuls. Sunday’s meeting will be my last one for a few months at least. I’m burned out.

Also, I took a step to remove pressure on myself to keep this blog updated. As long as the blog was the home page of mitchwagner.com, I felt obliged to keep it updated a couple of times a week, which I have not been doing, which made me feel like I’d let myself down. So instead, I converted mitchwagner.com to a nameplate site. That’s a fancy way of saying I made the “About Mitch Wagner” page into the site home page, and moved the blog to a secondary page, at mitchwagner.com/blog.

I now feel free to not update the blog for weeks at a time, because it’s not hanging out as the home page. I’ll update it when I have something significant to say. But I’m doing nearly all my personal blogging on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media nowadays.

I know that’s a controversial decision in some parts, to blog outside of one’s own personal domain. I understand the dangers of giving up control of my content like that. But, as I said, I’ll continue to cross-post significant posts like this one on mitchwagner.com. And for me it seems to be a choice between doing my personal blogging on social media, and not doing personal blogging at all.

Professionally of course I blog at The CMO Site, and do a decent volume of it too.

In another effort at simplification, I’ve been cutting back on checking social media. For a while I was limiting myself to two checks a day. I’ve been creeping back up in volume, but nowhere near checking at the rate I did before, when I often checked a dozen times a day.

Monday I felt relaxed, and yet worked hard and was very productive. It felt odd. I’m addicted to stress, and like anything you’re used to, it’s tough to change, even when change is for the better and you’re immediately rewarded.

What will I do with all that free time? I have ideas. One idea is I’d just like to relax. Sometimes I just like to sit and read, or watch TV for a few hours at a time. I hear people still do that.

A few weeks ago, I put myself on a social media diet. I decided I would check for updates twice a day, no more.

I still post updates throughout the day when it strikes me to do so, like this one. But I don’t check for replies, or check other people’s updates, at other than my scheduled times.

I’m amazed and thrilled by how much time that frees up for me. Although there is also a small voice that wonders how much time I’ve wasted over the past five years obsessively checking social media for updates. If you wondered why there’s still no cure for cancer, well, now you know.

This change wasn’t difficult at all. I didn’t miss it. I often find myself looking forward to checking social media, but in a good way, the way you look forward to doing something you enjoy.

My only big concern about the cutback on social media use is that I might miss out on a breaking news story. But I’ll figure something out for that, or live with the tradeoff.

When I say I’m checking social media twice a day, that’s a simplification. I started at twice a day, decided that was too infrequent, went up to four times a day, decided that was too much, and now I’m back to twice a day.

Also, I’ll check social media if I have a good reason to do it — but first I ask myself if it really is a good reason, and almost always the answer is no. But if I find out about a breaking news story of the magnitude of the bin Laden assassination, I’ll open up a Twitter or Google+ stream and leave it running in my second monitor.

How about you? Are you making any effort to cut back on social media?

I went in for a classic barber haircut about two weeks ago at Pappy’s Barber Shop on El Cajon Blvd.

This was a single antique barber chair located in the back of a tattoo parlor. The barber was a 24-year-old guy who’d gone to barber school (he is not Pappy; he is one of Pappy’s minions). He wore a classic barber smock, and he gave me a haircut, shaved the back of my neck with a straight razor, and massaged my shoulders with two of these handheld barber massage machines. They look like this.

This is now a trend, according to an article I read somewhere that I can’t find a link to now. Classic barbershops are cropping up all over the country. It was the kind of experience you usually see in gangster movies.

They do hot-towel shaves, too, which I’ll try one day for a special occasion.

The barber seemed surprised when I asked him to trim my ears and eyebrows. “We don’t usually do that but since you asked…. ” he said. I was surprised at his surprise. but he was 24 years old, and I suspect all his clientele is under 30, mostly under 25, and so he lacks experience with the out-of-control eyebrows and ear hair a guy gets after he’s 45. And that’s not even talking about the nostril hair. Let’s not talk about that.

I liked the classic barber experience, and it was inexpensive, only $17. But it was a bit too much of a production to make a regular thing out of it.

Plus I did a little haircut experiment. Ten years ago, I decided my hair was sparse enough that the only way to avoid looking ridiculous was to start getting it cut really short, with a #2 clipper all over, about 1/8″ long all over my head. That’s the only haircut I have had since, except for twice when I went totally crazy. Once I went for the #1 clipper, which is even shorter than the #2.

And a few months ago, I was really out of control and said make it as short as you can without actually shaving my head. And they gave me a trim with something called a #0 clipper.

When I went to Pappy’s, it had been a few months since I had a haircut, and I wanted to do something different. So after brief consultation with the Hair Styling Professional, he gave me the #3 trim up-top, and a #2 and #1 along the sides.

And it’s been a couple of weeks and I don’t like it.

For one thing, I don’t really have a good conception about just how bald I am in the back. It seems to be neurologically impossible to form a mental picture of the entirety of your own head. From the front-on view, which is the only way I can visualize it, my hair looks merely thin. But I suspect an outside observer would say I am mostly bald. And the #3 clipper on top doesn’t look good from any angle other than the front. Or so Julie tells me, and after inspecting my scalp while standing between two mirrors, I believe her.

Normally, I’d wait a couple of more weeks to get my next haircut. The new haircut isn’t that bad. But a week from today I’m off to an all-hands corporate meeting, during which photos will be taken. And I suspect these photos will replace our existing profile pictures on our various websites. I’ll want to look my best for those photos, if only because I’ll be looking at them several times every workday for a very long time. So it’s off to get another haircut later today, and this time I’ll just go back to Hair Cut Pros, the Vietnamese place I’ve been using the past couple of years.