The other day I was driving to work and during the long commute (timewise long) I was thinking about the Internet. I use it for just about everything. I find things I wouldn’t normally be looking for on a daily basis. I thought about what a blessing it is for me (one who doesn’t like to use the telephone) to research something and get an answer without talking to anyone. But do I rely on it too much? 

What if I am actually relying on the Internet for things I should be already remembering. Here is an example: I am not mechanically inclined when it comes to cars. I never have. I now own two cars and don’t know how to fix them. If I were is worse off conditions I would be the one fixing them. I would have have to learn about them by trial and error or by learning watching someone else. Now with the modern wonders of the Internet I don’t have to learn from books, maybe some trial and error, but my point is that I have a resource or a crutch to fall back on since I really don’t know what I am doing. Am I dumber for this? Maybe fixing cars is a bad example since I believe that I get paid enough to have someone else fix my car. 

So really are we dumber for using the Internet? or are we smarter because we can use it to learn about things we may not have had a chance to learn about any other way? 

I think I am smarter because of the Internet. Or at least have more knowledge because of it. Here’s my last example: Baby names – We are searching for a name for our third boy. The first two were relatively easy to name. This one is proving harder than we want. But we have the Internet and hundreds of sites listing the popularity of names, their meanings, alternate spellings and origins. Prior to this our knowledge would have come from our immediate surroundings. We would only know of babies born around us. We might also have the baby names book for the checkout lane of the grocery store. So now we are looking up names from England, Germany and Brazil. This was unheard of 30 years ago. Hooray for the Internet!

We moved out of our house officially on February 5th. The house was packed on the 1st and the truck was loaded on the 4th. The Internet was taken down at that point. All computers and peripherals were packed away for the journey. Once here I started work and our stuff was delivered on the same day. So we lived among many boxes. Susan has done a good job of unpacking and getting us settled. One big thing to do was to sign up for an Internet service. I did some research into what providers were available to us in our area. It turns out… not many. Comcast became the winner by default. 

I called a number given to me by a coworker and it saved us a few hundred dollars. It wasn’t a black market, tap into the neighbors cable, back alley kind of deal. Their website just had really high prices, especially for setup. So I scheduled an appointment for installation. The day arrived and the tech didn’t show up. We did receive a call saying that he would be late… 2 hours late. We had plans that night so we cancelled the install and rescheduled for 6 days later.

We are now online. The cable is good. We even have a new Texas home phone number. I guess that makes it official.  One thing I can say is that the speed is amazing. Not quite as good as at work but still faster than Cox.

Flock Browser – The Social Web Browser

I am not big on browser competition. I stuck with IE for a long time. Now I use Safari for everything unless it can’t do something (i.e. Zillow.com doesn’t work in Safari).

Tonight I was watching a past episode of Screencasts Online and the topic was Flock. I checked it out and it seems to be good so far. I have some more testing to do but I like it.
I works on windows too.

Ever since Apple included podcasts as part of iTunes I have had a fondness for them. I would not even want to guess how many I am currently subscribed to… but the disk space is pushing 20 Gigs. One of the podcasts I subscribed to recently is tekzilla. The new producer there, Roger Chang, came from DL.TV which is a Ziff Davis production. Ziff does PC Magazine among many others. A recent episode of tekzilla turned me on to this siteBlogotheque: Take Away Shows!Not a bad music site. If it shows up in french, simply click the english link in the top right corner. Check out #62 Menomena. I liked that one the best so far. Enjoy!

After truly feeling disconnected from the world for 2 years I have started to watch TV again. (We are canceling our cable later this week.) The blasted writers are on strike so the quality has gone down and even some of my favorite show has stopped. There are only so many game/reality game shows one can take. For me it is about 5 minutes worth, you know right at the end of some dramatic pause that was added in during post production then it cuts to commercial. Well that turns me off. 

Okay, so where was I… So the fall season started and all the promos for new show were filling every break. I noticed one show that I thought looked good. I caught the replay of the first episode on a Saturday night. Chuck. You may have heard of it. You may hate it. I found it interesting and entertaining. It isn’t very often that I see a promo and like a show. The last time that happened was 2004 with LOST. Now I live a secret life of all things LOST. Susan even buys me the DVDs.

School as usual got in the way of any television experience, especially on a regular basis… except The Office but a club meeting destroyed that this last semester. Sometime in the fall I signed up for hulu.com. I finally got the invite to check them out. It is amazing. I have been very impressed although you kinda need a fast isp.

They have so many shows. The old ones are awesome, A-Team, Air Wolf, WKRP in Cincinnati and others. But most importantly they have current shows including Chuck. So on Friday and Saturday I watched the first 10 episodes. The boys were tired Friday night and they even stayed up to watch it. It is a clean, smart and funny show. There is some shooting and fighting but nothing excessive. And one of the cool things is one of the characters has an iPhone with the same case as me. Sweet!