Tuesday we went to the Asheville Mall to the Dell kiosk and ordered the power adapter. It came today and poof! I am on the ‘net!
I kept a journal of sorts of my twelve days offline. What an interesting experience. What I learned? I can live with out the email, without the blog, without the comics. I am not addicted to those. I do like talking via email to friends I will never meet and I realized how vital they are to my life. I missed them, much like I would if I were on vacation. How is so-and-so doing and what happened with another situation? Stuff like that.
But when it comes to the instant information, the ability to know the weather, know what a word means or what a person did, etc, well, I am addicted to that. Sitting through the crap on the Weather Channel just won’t do. Gimme the weather at a glance via Weather Watcher. WordWeb is a great program and boy did it get a work out but, for example, it couldn’t tell me enough information about the smelting of iron and what kind of carbon goes into it to make steel. I wanted Wikipedia and I wanted it now!
The desktop computer works but its CD drive is dead and it won’t talk to the internet. Which means I couldn’t access my files on the internet. However, I did have the external drive that I had just saved all my WIP files and other such stuff. Had I not done that, I would have no way to access my WIPs. I could have gone to the library and downloaded them onto something, yes. As a great location to do massive backups, that folder on the ‘net is an excellent place. But for instant retrieval in a non-internet setting, it failed. I may go back to putting the active files on CDs as well as sync-ing with the external drive.
For a few minutes, the external drive didn’t seem to want to work with the desktop. For a few minutes, I don’t think my heart beat. I felt as if my heart and stomach had switched places. All those files, all my writing, all my research and notes. Unreachable. Untouchable. When it finally did start whirring and blinking, I breathed. My heart thudded as it fell back into place. My stomach decided to hold onto its own contents.
More later.
I’ve been preoccupied and not getting around much the last few days, so just found out you are back. So, welcome back! Interesting that you found you did not need us or the blog or email, but only weather updates… Heh…