Core Dump

Amanda and I recently got back from a trip to the Caribbean – specifically, to the island of Saint Martin – and while it was tropical and warm and lovely (you can see all my pictures from the trip here), it was also a bit of a culture shock – but not for the reasons you might think.

It wasn’t the food – there are enough tourists coming to this island to ensure that there’s always some typical American-style food near at hand if you aren’t feeling gastronomically adventurous.

It wasn’t the language – almost everyone spoke English, except for a few people in the remoter sections of the French side (naturally).

It wasn’t the fact that they use different money – the Dutch side pretty much exclusively uses the US Dollar (although their official currency is still the Netherlands Antillean guilder), and although the French side officially uses the Euro, they also accept US dollars pretty much everywhere (although sometimes at a slightly unfavorable fixed exchange rate).

It wasn’t the people – aside from their crrraaaazy driving, they were pretty much like people anywhere else, with the usual variations for culture (Dutch/French) and for climate.

It wasn’t the culture – although it was quite a bit more “relaxed” than our often tense, high-strung east-coast culture here in the US, it was quiet and nice and not at all jarring.

No, the biggest shock to us was the almost complete lack of Internet access.

Now, as Americans, we’ve become accustomed (in just a few short years, if you think about it) to ubiquitous, free, unlimited high-speed Internet access (via both wired and wireless connections).

We’ve become so used to it that we sort of expect it wherever we go – we expect it to be always on, and always available, no matter where we go. We expect to be able to pull out our iPhone or whatever and update our Facebook page from wherever we are in the world.

And when we finally find ourselves someplace where this is no longer true, it can be a bit of a shock!

In Saint Martin, for example, we landed and found that there was NO signal whatsoever for Amanda’s iPhone – it just could not pick up anything. It detected some of the cell networks on the island, but it could not connect to them. (Ironically, my old, old, old Motorola RAZR phone connected just fine – but of course it can’t browse the web or send email or really do anything besides make calls and send text messages.) Even at the airport there was no Wi-Fi available (not even the paid variety!).

Our situation did not improve when we arrived at our hotel, either. Again, our expectations were tempered by what was commonplace back in the US – where a hotel without Wi-Fi, or at least a wired Internet connection in each room was considered an abomination.

Oh, the hotel had Wi-Fi – but it wasn’t free. In fact, it was ridiculously expensive (by our standards, at least). And it was also slow – a single 1 MB connection was shared by the entire hotel (both guests and staff!). And of course it was only accessible from your room – there was not enough range to keep using the Internet all the way down to the pool or the beach, even when the pool and beach were only a couple dozen feet from the hotel.

So in the end, our use of Internet was limited to short bursts in our hotel room, checking mobile sites (mainly Gmail) that were very light & fast, so that they didn’t feel abysmally slow on the pitiful 1 MB connection.

In truth though, it was a very eye-opening experience – a reminder that although the Internet has indeed become ubiquitous in many places, it is not everywhere… and even in places where it is available, sometimes that availability is much more limited than we here in the US are used to. It also made me realize just how much we take it (the Internet) for granted sometimes.

But at the same time, it was also interesting to “unplug” for a while – easy enough for me to do, actually – and remember what life was like before we were all electronically connected to one another.

Although I wait eagerly for the day when fast Internet is freely (or cheaply) available world-wide, I think it’s still worth having a few places where the Internet can’t reach, if only to let us “escape” it for a while. Even though going somewhere without Internet can be a bit of a culture shock to those of us who’ve grown up with it, I think it’s still good to get culturally shocked from time to time – just to keep us all on our toes, and remind us of how good we all have it.

Recently someone asked me why I don’t have a Facebook account.

The simplest answer I could come up with was that I simply don’t need it – for me, Facebook is redundant.

The person who asked me tried to tell me how great Facebook was, and how you could do so many things with it, like connecting with friends, keeping up-to-date on what you’re doing, and easily share photos (among other things).

But the thing is… I can already do all of those things without Facebook. So what’s the point? Where’s the benefit for me?

I mean, look at it this way:

• I own my own domain and have my own website.
• I have and maintain my own blog, which means I have total control over every aspect of it (appearance, function, etc.) and to which people can “subscribe” using the RSS feed (an open standard).
• For sharing pictures, I have a Flickr Pro account. Because Flickr is dedicated to sharing photos, it does a really good job of it.
• For messaging, I have IM and Twitter and of course email.
• For people trying to find me, I have a Google Profile (and of course I am not a hard person to find – one of the advantages of having a very unique name!).

(There’s also the fact that I consider Facebook – and all similar sites – as being the modern reincarnations of  the crappy websites that populated Geocities back in the early days of the web.)

So really, Facebook offers no compelling advantages for me – no real reason for me to use it. Everything it can do, I can already do without having to sign up for yet another online account.

It might come as a surprise to some people to hear me say that I am not a slave to technology – after all, I’m a self-described “computer geek.” You’d think, therefore, that I walk around with an iPhone or Blackberry (or both!) strapped to my chest at all times, checking email and looking up information on-line everywhere I go.

However, you couldn’t be farther from the truth.

While it’s true that I am a major computer geek, and I would love to have (say) a nice little netbook for looking up information, sending email, writing blog posts, etc., the fact of the matter is that it’s because I’m a computer geek that I’m not a slave to technology.

Because I’m confident about it, I don’t allow it to control me – I control it.

For example, I know many people with mobile email who are, quite frankly, addicted to it (think: crackberry). They’re always checking email – all the time – no matter where they are. Even if I had a mobile email device (which I don’t), I wouldn’t be checking email all the time. As it is, I don’t check email often, even when I’m at my computer. I’m confident enough with the technology to know that I don’t need to answer every single email at the moment it comes in – that I don’t need to be “on-line” all the time. I control the technology – I use it when I want to, not the other way around.

Another example is when the power goes out – for people who are slaves to technology, to computers, the Internet, email, Twitter, social networking, what have you, the power going out is like having their “fix” cut off – they don’t know what to do. Without email, chat, or whatever, they’re lost. They’re so badly enslaved that they don’t know what to do when they are “freed” from it, for whatever reason.

As for me, even though I spend my entire day at the computer (and often much of the evening, too), writing code, answering emails, being online, writing blog posts like this one and so on – when the power goes out, I just shrug, grab a book from my bookshelf, and go read. Or, if it’s dark, I’ll go for a drive, or a walk, or just plain go to bed.

I control the technology around me – it doesn’t control me.

For many people today, the opposite is true. It’s worth it to sit and really take a look at yourself and see whether you are one of those people – whether you’re a slave to technology. Even in today’s connected world, it’s important to be able to just leave it all behind sometimes, to just “let go.” It’s the difference between being controlled and being in control.

Well, it’s been a little over a week now, and the verdict on the router-reset issue is:

Linksys Wins!

Since switching to the Linksys, I’ve had zero router resets and my Internet connection has been rock-solid. My Mozy online backup has been able to run each night without interruption, and during the day my work (which often involves some IP-based telephony) has been fine as well (nothing more irritating than making an IP-phone call and having your router reset!!).

I still don’t know what was causing the Netgear router to reset frequently – but at this point, I really don’t care. I don’t know what I’m going to do with the Netgear router, either – I’d sell it or give it away, but knowing that it has this problem makes me feel guilty. So I guess… into the great bit-bucket in the sky it must go.

I’ll be sad to see the Netgear go – I always had a soft spot for Netgear in the past. Their products retained that “metal enclosure” look long after Linksys and others had jumped on the “plastic” shell bandwagon back when home networking became “popular.” And those metal-shelled products were easy to rack mount, with the right brackets, which was always nice.

But now, all home networking products are plastic-shelled, and some (it would seem) are no longer as high-quality as they once were.

As for me – I’m just glad my ‘net connection is reliable again. Internet, ahoy!

Icon courtesy of the Crystal Icon Set.

I know it’s a silly thing to do, but I sometimes like to look at the visitor stats for this website – as well as for the buns’ website and Amanda’s blog.

Of course, sometimes these statistics are a bit depressing – but that’s neither here nor there. For “entertainment purposes,” here are some recent statistics:

As you can see, the Bunnies are clearly the most popular overall. I get more “total” page views because I have over 1,000 posts stretching back several years which cover a lot of different topics. (My post on Manual vs. Automatic is still the #1 page, with my Desktop Madness series being next in line thanks to Google Image Search.)

But Amanda is really coming up strong – since starting her blog less than a month ago, she’s had nearly the same number of visits to her site as I have in the same time period. Amazing!

I think I’ve created two blogging monsters!