Interesting Internet Episode

A couple weeks ago, the internet access at my apartment was shut down. I was in shock. I've had consistent internet access for so long that I felt such an extreme sudden void. I even tried to load up a FireFox browser to do a Yelp.com search for nearby coffee shops with free wifi. Yes, I really tried to do that.

Of course it wasn't difficult to walk around a bit and find free wifi to leech, but it required just enough extra effort that I felt uncomfortably stranded from internet access. Sitting at my laptop, uselessly disconnected, I wrote up a list of my uses of the internet:

1. Email
2. Research for internet business ideas
3. Tech news, world news, and keeping informed on latest advancements
4. Blogs, forums, random web browsing
5. Online bank maintenance
6. Random research of locations, events, people, movies, music, words, etc.
7. Ordering stuff
8. Gamage

A lot of stuff. It was going to be rough. While at work, I searched for cafés close to my apartment with free wifi. (Sites falling under the categories of email, blogs, forums, games, etc. are blocked at work.) After getting home that day, I walked out a café, which ended up only being about 10 minutes away. I bought a smoothie, and whipped out my laptop for catching up on all of the web stuff that I had missed for days.

It all took about 15 minutes. Maybe 20. I read all of my email, news, blog stuff, made bank transfers, all of that stuff. All so fast. I suddenly began to wonder how I spent so many hours in the past wasting away on the internet. When finally faced with a situation where I only intended to use the internet productively for important things, I could accomplish everything in very little time.

Of course there are lots of random unpredictable uses of internet access, but still. How much time do you waste on the internet?

How Straight is Your Line?

There are two kinds of imagination: fantasy imagination, and plausible imagination. Fantasy imagination includes anything that the mind could possibly stir up: anything, anywhere, at any time, of any significance, ever. Plausible imagination involves things that could be, but are not: life dreams, future goals, actions that could be taken, words that could be spoken. Some figments are closer to our grasps than others.

Our daily lives are lines in the plane of plausibility. (Some may recall the mathematical representation of real, imaginary, and complex numbers on a 2-dimensional plane). At any point in time, we are in one specific position, and we are headed in one direction, so we are always momentarily stranded in one line, one dimension; we can only look off to our surroundings, at our potential, and at the choices that we could make.

But over the course of time, we may assume a path that could only fit on a 2-dimensional plane, with plausible imaginations of one moment being actual realities of the next.

How straight is your line?