This weekend I find myself, quite unintentionally, without any access to the Internet. Despite the fact that my wife and I have left the big city for the weekend to head off for a nice quiet weekend away, we had intended to take along a laptop with a CDMA Air-Card which would provide some Internet access via the cell-phone network. We did remember the laptop, and the Air-Card unfortunately I completely neglected to pack a power-supply for the laptop.
Crud. Now what? I have my MacBook with me which is where this post is originating, but I don’t have a PCMCIA slot in the MacBook to accommodate the AirCard. I will probably be able to pick up a wi-fi hotspot from one of the neighbours, but that’s going to involve getting in the car and parking, rather suspiciously, on the street outside someone’s house to get access to the internets. Am I that desperate? Can I truly not live for three days without my Internets??
I’m sad to report that the answer is yes. My name is Keith, and I’m a Webaholic. And it’s not just me, both my wife and I felt a mild sense of panic when we realized that our access to the Internet was going to be seriously curtailed this weekend, if not eliminated altogether.
- I was going to work on some Flickr reorganization.
- She was going to watch the olympics via CBC.ca’s on-line Olympic coverage.
- I was going to use my VPN to connect up to work and get a few things straightened out for a couple of projects I’m working on.
- She was going to connect to the iTunes store and download the new iPod Touch software and play around with some applications.
- I was going to work on a revised version of the blog template (yes, the same revision I blogged about months ago).
- I was going to get the next post in my Hardy for the Home series written (and use SSH into the server back home to do it).
Suffice to say the plans have been revised somewhat. We were both quite happy to do other things, we brought books to read, we walked on the beach, we spent some tourist time in a nearby village shopping in the local mom & pop shops. It was just a shift from what we had originally planned. Despite the fact that we traveled out of the Lower Mainland for nearly 6 hours to get where we are, we had still intended a rather Internet-focused long weekend. I managed to find a HotSpot (read: parked on the side of an unlit road stealing unsecured wi-fi) to check email, but the connection was a bit too unreliable to try using WordPress.
Well there’s my story of net addiction. What’s yours?
Photo Credit: Nataliej on Flickr
4 responses so far ↓
1 Herne // Aug 21, 2008 at 5:01 am
OMG! That’s just…sad!
2 Raul // Aug 23, 2008 at 7:54 am
Um. I wake up every day and my first movement is not in the direction of my coffee maker but in the direction of the computer
3 Cloudless Computing :: Things To Do When You’re Without Your Interwebs | K's Weblog // Aug 24, 2008 at 12:02 am
[...] here I am without access to the Internet. So what have I done? I’ve found a way to do my computing without the cloud! Here are [...]
4 Crow // Sep 19, 2008 at 10:27 pm
If it makes you feel any better, my week in Japan without connection was absolute hell. What was nearly as bad was people that went crazy from not seeing me online and not hearing from me for a week :p
Luckily as soon as I got to HK, I managed to find a network but then I never moved from the window….
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