The Garden of the Blind

It’s a sign of our times that many of us get net-addicted. I’ve had high-speed, always on access for most of the last 7 years. Most of that time, it was my computer or the remote servers that slowed me down, not the size of my pipe. It took a lot for me to move back into my mom’s basement, where her internet wouldn’t even share properly. (Note to proxy software writers: give us the option to share a few non-traditional ports, or just to open it all up. Secure email is coming, and basically there’s a lot of web services that people need other than the top 5. Also, thanks for making something that works as well as it does so far.)

So, with an only intermittent connection for 4 months, and a slow one at that, I found myself reading less and less material, and in the end, I didn’t even care that I spent 3 weeks without reading any comics (the one thing that I always did online).

What surprised me was that there were no withdrawals. When we were moved in, I kept putting off signing up for DSL. I guess I liked the simplicity of a connectionless life. Now that I’m back on, I guess I’ll see how this goes. At least it’s nice to have my mail, anti-virus, and operating system updated again.