Six Days to Go . . . . . [9/18/09]

Today was spent making arrangements to have my laptop be able to ‘speak’ to the Internet while I’m in Italy. Of course, this is only the year 2009, so that’s not as easy today as it will be in ten years. I employed the good counsel of a wise twenty-something and came to understand that if you want your “solution” to be easy (meaning the use of your own cell phone company instead of shifting over to another provider) and legal (meaning not downloading a ’hack tether’ from the Internet to couple your iPhone with your laptop so it can serve as your 3G antenna), then it’s going to cost you plenty. The phone companies don’t understand the concept that you might only need this device/service for 3 weeks, and that, although you are willing to pay a fair price for having and using Internet access during that time, you don’t think it’s fair to require a 2-year contract (the time period you are expected to commit to the service if you want to avoid the $175 early termination fee). I gave in and signed up. We’ll see how well it works over there. To tell the truth, it’s fun contemplating how much easier communications will be with a laptop connecting directly to the Internet, even in remote coastal towns where the term “hot spot” pertains only to wood burning pizza ovens. My iPhone would have linked to the Internet with no special equipment or service contract; no problem. Typing on an iPhone is slow, however. Doable, but slow. And you’re having to constantly zoom and in and out of text, and sliding it from left to right to read what you need to know. It’s miraculous they have crammed so much technology into this one little device, and yes, Ben Franklin would be very impressed “if he came back today,” but there are undeniable advantages to typing at 70+ words a minute without looking at the keyboard (thank you Mrs. Kinnemer) and being able to see full lines as they sit on the page.