Wireless Connectivity

Our house is now equipped with wireless internet. It's no big deal. Just spend forty bucks at the local electronics outlet, bring the box home, and basically plug it in the wall and your modem and you are up and running. Any idiot (as it takes one to know one) can set it up....

but it's still pretty cool!

Now, I can sit in my recliner in the basement, typing stuff like this, while my wife works (she's a teacher for a virtual school) upstairs on our desktop computer. If I want to follow the stats of my favorite basketball players, while I watch "Celebrity Fit Club 2", it's my option. Or, I can play music out on the deck out back from a web-based radio station or music service (all eighties music, all the time!) and it's no big deal.

Because now, we're wireless!

I remember when Dad brought home our first computer... an Apple IIe. It was back in an age where Lionel Richie ruled Top 40 radio and MTV actually played videos. There was no mouse. No Windows. No USB ports, memory sticks, on-line gaming, E-bay, or I-Tunes. Just a green screen, some really bad graphics (that we thought were amazing), and a word processing program that required ample usage of about 20 different function keys. I think the thing cost $2000 and didn't have as much memory as my current cell phone. Since Al Gore hadn't invented the internet yet, people would come to our house and look at our Apple like it had decended from Mars. There was so little you could do with it, that many people openly wondered why Dad had wasted his money on a "personal computer". And outside of printing a few history papers (I was proudly the first person in our high school to use the excuse, "My printer wasn't working, so I couldn't turn in my paper today") playing the few games we owned at the time, it really didn't have any other functions.

What a difference 20 years makes.

Now computers are like additional arms, or feet. People can make their living doing nothing but selling gizmos on virtual auction sites, fixing software applications, and keeping networks up-and-running for small businesses. Being able to take it with us, thanks to wirelessness, is becoming less an oddity, an more of necessity. Without even realizing it, computers have intigrated themselves into the lives of all ages of people (my three year old learns his colors on a website designed for pre-schoolers while at the same time his great-grandmother, who is probably reading this now, keeps up to date on the news via her favorite blogs) and are changing the way we live.

And what can we learn from this.... that change will come for each one of us, and our ability to cope and adapt with that change will largely determine how comfortable, or uncomfortable we will be in the future. If we embrace it, and expect it, then as life changes, our stress level will be noticably lower than if we are constantly at war with the world moving at light speed around us.

In other words, better that wirelessness is cool, as opposed to a necessary evil (or just plain evil).

More on this tomorrow.

God Bless,
Bryan