Tuesday, October 18, 2005

A Whole Different World

Moving from the heart of San Francisco to rural Michigan is a shock in multiple ways. One of the biggest has been technologically.

In SF, I had wireless Internet access almost everywhere, and most certainly at home and work. Even in all of my travels last month, I could connect via Wi-Fi in Boston, Philly, NYC, DC, Orlando, Chicago, Holland, etc.

Then I got to Boyne.

Thankfully, my parents have DSL. But wireless is not available, meaning that right now I am using a cable pulled out of the back of their desktop PC and plugged into my laptop. Not the most convenient, but it'll work for now. (All the while San Francisco is providing Wi-Fi for the entire city.)

Another issue is the age of the computers I'm having to work with. The computer sitting next to me is about the size of a small refrigerator and is louder than a car from the '80s with a bad muffler. When trying to e-mail a file from that computer to the one my mom uses at work, I had to install a driver for my flash drive (it uses Windows 98SE). Then I had to download the file at mom's work, which uses a dial-up connection (I didn't realize those were still around). After waiting 20 minutes for a two-page PDF file to download, the version of Acrobat Reader decided it didn't like the file...and there was no way I was going to try and download an update! (In case you're wondering why I didn't just use my flash drive to transport the file, you should know that the computer was using Windows 98, which doesn't accept flash drives.) That made for a rough evening.

What will probably happen is that as soon as I adjust to living in this low-technology world, I'll move back to a big city. Isn't that the way it happens?

1 comment:

sallymfisher said...

Hey Chris...for some reason lately I've been checking this. I really liked the comments about the football game--I didn't realize we came from home towns that were so similiar--football! I saw Boyne was ranked 6th in the state for football in the paper yesterday--Mendon, my home town, is number 4. I went to our game of the year Friday night and it was so much fun to remember how rich that heritage is. We don't have a cannon for touchdowns, just this huge liberty looking bell. Well wonderful! We should talk soon.