The Wild Frontier of the Internet

We are now back in internet business with our Apple Airport Extreme Router.  For nearly three weeks most of our wireless internet was non-functional, read: no signal on iPads or laptops.  We'd had two visits from our cable company, multiple moderate-cursing sessions about the dropped off signal until finally, through an internet search on the desktop machine (which isn't wifi, but also wasn't functioning all that great), we diagnosed it as a router going bad. 

Kind of like these guys.

We picked up a new router at a local box store, and Dave spent Saturday afternoon installing it and getting us up and running.By last night things were much smoother, we could get signal on all our other screens, and we even now have a Guest Wifi (get ready to change your passwords, kids).  So we sat down to watch Transcendence, a movie starring Johnny Depp and an earnest gang of renegades fighting the takeover of a Depp-like machine throughout the known universe, aka, the internet/web/connected world.

Kind of like these guys.

This is the famous OPTE Map of the Internet, from 2005, showing only about 30% of the data they had available at the time.  I've used it before when I taught about the web in my English classes, and it was also used in the movie last night.

It was an interesting juxtaposition, considering what we'd just been through.  Yes, runaway machines can certainly be a concern, but at this stage of life, I missed sitting in bed, reading blogs on my laptop at night.  I missed being able to look at social media and read our scriptures together on my iPad after dinner.  And what this taught me was how seamlessly we'd blended our machines into our lives, making use of them in keeping us connected to the larger outside world.

I was happy to be back in the saddle again, riding my internet range.