Internet dependent, that is. Yes, I do exhibit some symptoms of addiction, but I must admit to enjoying a few days of being completely unplugged. I doubt that would be the case were I truly addicted. It happens whenever I come to my lake house. Here, we have no Internet connection, not even a phone line for dial-up service. I have to set my iPhone in one particular windowsill to maybe get two bars of EDGE service. We get our TV via satellite, and we've considered doing the same for broadband, but just can't justify the cost for a house we only visit for a weekend every six or eight weeks. My dad used to say we were so far back in the woods we got our sunshine by mail-order.
For someone who makes a living on-line, I have to say I enjoy an occasional 48 - 72 hour respite. It gives me time to do something I rarely get to do, think. Not the problem solving, concentration kind of thinking I have to do almost every day, but the random daydreaming type of thinking you only get to do when there are no distractions. It does a body good to occasionally revert to a simpler time where email and text message alerts don't sound every few minutes and the iPhone only gets sporadic reception. My 14 year-old daughter doesn't see the value in this. Being disconnected from her on-line community of gaming and FaceTime friends puts her in a most disagreeable mood. It's really fortunate she can still send and receive text messages (although spottily) or we'd never get her to come up here with us.
While serene, this is no panacea. On those none too infrequent occasions when you need a plumber, electrician or someone else to help with the inevitable breakdowns, absence of some sort of Internet connection reminds me of how much I've come to rely on Google and the on-line Yellow Pages. It's hard to imagine how out of date a three-year-old phone book can be. Since disconnecting the hard line phone a couple of years ago, we haven't gotten a new phone book in the mail. It amazes me how many small businesses no longer exist after 36 months! It's really frustrating to struggle to get a cell signal only to waste it on a recording,"The number you've reached is no longer...".
One thing I am grateful for is my Navigon app. All it needs to function is a GPS signal. I made the decision to buy it a couple of years ago and I've been very glad I did on more than a few occasions. My initial decision was based on the original iPhone's lack of turn-by-turn directions. Navigon is a full-featured GPS navigation app that works on both my iPhone and iPad. The original version I purchased forced you to purchase the entire continental US & Canada for $79 or Europe for $89. Today it is a much better value at $29 and you have the option to only download the states you want. The point is, traveling requires a good stock of off-line maps. Cell signals are not as ubiquitous as the wireless carriers would have you believe and there's nothing worse than being lost and staring at an empty grid pattern in Google Maps. Navigon is fully functional anywhere, provided you have a map for the area you're in. Fortunately for me, that includes the vicinity of our lake house. We've owned the property for 35 years, but I can still manage to get turned around in the woods.
It's also amazing how many hardware vendors assume availability of an always-on Internet connection. Over the holidays, my daughter got a Seagate GoFlex Home external hard drive to backup her Mac. The app on the setup CD completely surrenders on step 1 if the Seagate web site can't be reached. So, I thought I'd just set the drive up manually using Safari to connect to it's on-board web server. No luck. It seems the same setup program is hard coded into the device with no way to circumvent it short of completely wiping the drive with Disk Utility. I wouldn't be afraid to do that for a drive of my own, but the built-in utilities on the device are probably the only way a non-techie like my daughter can manage the rig. Punt.
Thank goodness I have lots of other fun things to do up here. There's hiking, fishing, cruising the woods on the four-wheeler and oh yes, writing this on my non-connected laptop. I'll upload it when I get back home.