Thanks, Adelphia

My cable internet and cable TV were offline from 2pm Monday until 9am today -- 19 hours.  They were also offline for a half hour on Friday, and according to my logs, the net connection frequently goes out for a couple hours in the wee periods of the morning.  And let’s not forget the 6 hours it was offline 3 weeks ago -- 3 weeks to the hour, no less.

This reminds me of when we got our first computer in 1995.  It was really cool at first, especially since we’d been begging our parents for one for years.  (We were also in our early-to-mid teens, so what seemed like years of begging might have actually only been a few days.)

But the coolness faded fast, because we didn’t "have the internet" as they say.  We didn’t get online till sometime in 1997; I know because our first username/email account was eggman97.  And without the internet, a computer is cold and impersonal.  It’s a completely isolated system.  When you sit down and use it, it’s the same as it was yesterday, and the day before.  It’s entirely static, boring -- no, worse than that, it’s depressing.  If it doesn’t let you talk to your friends, email people, read up-to-the-second news, and compulsively read the boring details of people’s lives in their online journals aka "blogs," then what good is it?  No good, that’s what.