2010-07-27 » Where'd the Internet go?

For reason’s I’ll explain next week, I’ve had really spotty access to the Internet most of the past week. I have been able to connect about 10% of the times I’ve tried, and even then it’s not worked very well (unless you count 50+% packet loss as working well). Right now it seems to be working somewhat, so I’m going to try to write up this quick post before it stops working again.

Anyway, what I was going to write about is how much it sucks when you can’t get on the Internet. I’ve realized just how dependent I’ve become on using the Internet to do such things as:

• check the weather forecast
• lookup some information about some thing or place
• find directions
• compare products before buying
• stay in touch with friends and co-workers

It’s possible to do all of these things without the Internet, (people survived quite a while to get us here) but now that we’ve got it, it’s really hard to go back. There’s just so much information available online trying to compare products by reading the boxes in a store just really seems frustrating.

In the future, I imagine Internet access will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to get offline. Until then I guess I’ll just have to look at some options to make sure that I always have Internet access wherever I go, if I need it. I’ll let you know how that goes — assuming that my Internet connection works.