Diane has authored several books on cooking and other lifestyle subjects - all are available at a bookstore
near you. She presently lives in Macon, Georgia.
Computers continue to amaze us all. These electronic wonders sit in homes across the world, aiding us with everyday things we now take for granted. It's truly hard to imagine life without them anymore. The Internet is a prime reason for this addiction. Cyberspace virtually puts the world at our fingertips, and we love it. The key to great Internet surfing is in our connection speed. These days a good portion of us enjoy the speed of cable, which puts to shame our old dial up service.
The first time I started really using computers back in 97, I thought dial up service was the coolest thing known to man. Well, except for maybe the X Files. Anyway, this bizarre phone line connection allowed us to enter a universal world. Suddenly everything was in our reach. We could see or purchase anything. Dial up service was the bomb! After months and months of use, I began to get annoyed with that horrific noise the computer would make. It wasn't long before I started to mock and emulate the sound. Later came the phone dilemma.
You know the routine. You're surfing the web, and all of the sudden the computer spits out one little word, “Goodbye.” At first you cringe with hatred and betrayal, because you almost got the highest bid on that Ebay auction, but you lost connection at the last second. Time passes and the disconnecting eventually drives you insane. Every time you're online, someone calls or picks up the phone. As opposed to hating your family, you choose to hate the dial up service instead.
Thank God for cable and DSL. If you still have a dial up service, you must be that last guy wearing the Members Only jacket. With high-speed Internet in our grasp, we never want to hear the scream of dial up again. Cable Internet made it all easier. You click on a website link and it pops up immediately. You watch a movie trailer, and it plays right now. You don't wait an hour for it to load. This is phenomenal in infinite ways. With dial up service, tiny little tasks took us hours. Now with cable connection, we are done in minutes. If you do still suffer the pains of dial up, you may want to give cable speed a try. I can promise you that once you surf the web with the speed of cable connection, you will leave your dial up service in the past where it belongs.
