It all began with Blogger, I think, but I’m not sure when Pyra Labs introduced their first version of it. Wikipedia was founded in 2001, MySpace was launched in 2002, and Facebook appeared in 2004. I think Twitter came next, but I don’t know what year. I like Blogger (and its descendents) and Wikipedia, but the newer constructs leave me cold.
I spent the entire morning and part of the afternoon at Best Buy recommitting myself to Apple and learning about MobileMe. The Apple salesperson–a nice young guy name Colin–was very patient and worked me through the whole MobileMe installation process, account set-up, and synchronization of my Mac address book and iPhone contact list. So now I have a master system that will let me use my Mac and my iPhone almost interchangeably. I’m constantly amazed at how Apple designs things. My new iPhone makes much more sense to me than my senior-friendly Jitterbug. I’m exhausted, as always, after this new venture into Cyberspace.
The people at AT&T didn’t have the time to teach me anything about the iPhone I bought from them, so I hired a Best Buy Geek named Bobby to teach me the basics. I’m still in way over my head, but he taught me enough that I can start practicing. The only downside is that AT&T doesn’t cover Huntington–or, at best, it’s on-again/off-again–so I have to go away from home to make phone calls. Oh well, I bought it to take on my travels, not to use as my home phone.
The iPhone first became available in Vermont January 15, 2009. I managed to buy one January 16, and I’m not sure my life will ever be the same….
All of a sudden iPhones are available in Vermont, and I’m thinking I should probably try to get one to take on my road trip south of snow.
What, I ask, am I doing at a second McDonald’s on a beautiful Sunday afternoon? After Healthy Living, I tried Barnes and Noble, but they charge $3.99 for two hours of access to an AT&T connection. I didn’t have the time, money, energy, or will to explore that option, so I decided to try another McDonald’s to see if they had a supply of cards. So here I am using McDonald’s free Wi-Fi, which is a little tricky, but I wanted to try it. I’m too tired at this point to say much more except that getting to cyberspace without wires is more exhausting than being there.
Today I’m out trying to learn how to use my new road tool. My adventures so far have consisted of visits to various places around town that say they have Wi-Fi. It’s been a mixed experience so far. The Williston rest stop offers Wi-Fi, but I’d have to establish an account, which I didn’t feel like doing. So next I tried the Colchester Motel 6 to see if budget motels (the only kind I stay in) offer Wi-Fi in their rooms. Apparently in this Motel 6, some rooms have it and some rooms don’t. It costs $2.99 for 24 hours of Web access, most of which I wouldn’t use. They would give me a scratch-off card that would provide me with a temporary password good for the 24 hours. Next I stopped at the McDonald’s next door to the Motel 6 and learned that they do offer Wi-Fi, but they were out of the cards they hand out to customers who want to go online. I was getting a little frustrated because I had been cruising around for much of the morning with no Web access to show for it, so I went to Pho Dang for a huge and delicious bowl of pho ga (chicken noodle soup improved by the Vietnamese treatment) and met a delightful young man who sat down at the table with me. The soup and conversation with T. J. made up for the defeats of the morning. First stop this afternoon brought me to Healthy Living, where I beamed up the Web free of charge, no accounts, no cards, no passwords — nothing between me and access to cyberspace. So here I sit, completely unwired and battery powered, which feels quite liberating. Now I just need to remember to plug in when I get home so I don’t run my battery out of juice. At this point I’ve got 78% left — 2.5 hours — which means the battery has enough life to keep me in business for substantial blocks of time. So the challenge when I’m traveling is going to be to find the good Wi-Fi hotspots wherever I am.
Because I’m going on a month-long vacation south of snow, I decided I needed a “road tool” so I’d be able to send and receive e-mails and post entries to my blogs. I discovered a new product that seems to be perfect for the tasks I have in mind — a little navy blue Acer Aspire One Netbook that’s about the size of a slender hardback book and cost me only $285. It uses Wi-Fi for Web access and has a battery that lasts somewhere between three and four hours. So now I can visit cyberspace without wires of any kind, which will be a new experience for me. The only challenge is that the Acer uses Microsoft Windows, and I’m a Mac person. Oh well, Mac doesn’t offer a netbook, so I’m going to have to break the faith at this point in my journey.
As I explore cyberspace and my relationship to it, I realize that my single most important cyber project is the blog I call A Naturalist’s Journal, which was my first blog and remains the one that grounds me on this Earth during my own lifetime. I really do need to spend more time on it. New Year’s Resolution: I will spend more time on my Naturalist’s Journal than I do on any of my other cyber projects.
I was reading a newspaper article about a 44-year-old professional named Michael Howe who has recently co-founded a company called YOUDiligence that specializes in monitoring social networking sites. The company offers an automated ssearch tool that replaces the need for parents or guardians to manually monitor their children’s activity on MySpace and Facebook. When asked why he does what he does, he said, “I studied philosophy at Bowdoin. My thesis adviser was a brilliant but broken-down man. The story went that his wife had thrown the only copy of his masterpeice into the fire during an argument, and that he had never been the same afterwards. I decided that working in the digital realm, where redundancy is omnipresent, was a good thing.” I guess that’s what I’m thinking about cyberspace these days. Now, of course, I need to look up digital….
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