I am tired of the Internet...

[JoeyGee]

I remember 10 years or so ago when the Internet (or at least WWW) was relatively new. I spent HOURS taxing my 33.6 bps modem scouring the Internet, sending e-mail, playing in chat rooms thinking there was NO WAY I would ever tire of the coolest invention ever. I now take all that for granted, and I am just bored with the Internet. The few times I have an hour or so to kill, I sit down, check my e-mail, check for posts here, and then...nothing. Now and then there will be a new (to me) site with interesting stuff, but even then, it's nowhere near as exciting as it used to be.

The kids are in bed, the library is closed. Do I really have to actually have a conversation with LOML?

[Ken Weaver]

The kids are in bed, the library is closed. Do I really have to actually have a conversation with LOML?

Wouldn't hurt

[bmyers]

"WWW" or surfing in front of your PC is old school Pops.. It's about chat,multiplayer games, tv shows, podcasting, MP3s and blackmail movies taken on your cell phone. It's a whole new world out there and it all fits in your pocket.

Either way, be happy that the kids are in bed and sleeping. Everything after that is gravy..

Bill

[kwgeorge]

Well I can remember being on a 110 bps modem and thought moving to a Hayes 300bps was just the greatest thing. At that time the local BBS’s were very popular places to hang out. When I did get on the Internet originally it was via a UNIX shell account that was entirely text based. Yeah, believe it or not I go back with this stuff even farther than that but I was keeping the conversation relevant.

I think we all get bored with anything we do after awhile. I think in this case it is probably worse for someone like me that makes a living with computers also. Still I can find all kinds of things to do with them. I find myself constantly looking up reference material on the net, Window Shopping (Pun intended), drawing plans for projects and of course hanging out here. I don’t spend near the time on the computer as I once did at home but it still has its uses.

Ken

[JoeyGee]

Wouldn't hurt

I just told her folks on the Internet told me I should spend more time with her. She told me to get a second opinion

[MilDoc]

Yeah, I pretty much feel the same way. Started on the internet back when there was no world-wide web, about 1982. Try and do a serach and get a bunch of garbage to weed through. Used to be a lot of fun. Now it's more of a chore. Email, BT3Central, Amazon, and stuff for work. that's about it anymore.

[rickd]

Well, I'm not going to comment on you having a conversation with your wife or not but I will comment on the Internet. I find it more exciting and interesting today than I ever have - and I've been an avid user ever since I began to use Netscape back in the early '90's sometime.

I get most of my news now off of Internet newsites. Woodworking would be almost impossible for me without it - how would I research tools and equipment, locate plans, talk to other woodworkers etc. Anything I want to buy from a car to a tv set is made so easy with the tools available on the Internet.

I could go on and on I guess, but suffice to say for me, as I type away on by brand new Dell Laptop(bought off Dell's website and delivered direct to my home) that the Internet is getting better and better and I would have a vey difficult time going back to prehistoric days!

[leehljp]

I got into the local BB scene in Tokyo in '87. Thought it was great. 300 baud. even called some BBs in the States.

You guys don't know what cost is until you pay for phone prices here. It used to cost the equivilent of 20 cents a minute for phone line use. Then the WWW came and ISPs. ISPs charged $20 to $30 a month in ADDITION to the 10 to 20 cents a minute to the phone companies. THEN cable came in '97. Been happy since!

Like George, I did get onto the web a couple of times in its infancy thorugh a Unix maze. I got a Compuserve account in '89 and thought I was something! It didn't take me long to hate being just a number!

[Howard]

This internet business has been the most expensive thing I have ever encountered. Started a few years ago by researching camera equipment. Found a great Nikon site - nikonians.org - which is the equivalent of this site, the best of it's genre. Of course, everyone in there is raving about this new gadget and that new gadget and how it's made them a much better photographer and it probably has. So fast forward, I have a lot of the stuff they recommended. Now I find BT3 Central. I have learned so much about woodworking after I bought my BT3100 and this site that I have loaded up on Grizzly, Incra, Japanese water stones, Bessey, Bit's N Blades, Woodcraft, Rockler, etc, things I would never have heard of without this forum. Not that I'm complaining about any of this - I love it! My point is without the internet, I would be sitting with more money in the bank but not near as much satisfaction in my chosen hobbies. Wouldn't trade it for the world...

[cabinetman]

I've only been using the computer for a couple of years, so I haven't been on it long enough to get tired of it. At first it was to find old friends and do email. Then I had a vehicle problem and someone suggested I find an automotive forum and see if I can get an answer. Well, I did, and I did. It took about 30 minutes, including the time to register. Unbelievable. Then I thought, I wonder if there is a WW forum, and then the feces hit the fan. I'm addicted.

I find the internet and the browsing to be like having your own library, with your own librarian, that does her job with a click.



"I'M NEVER WRONG - BUT I'M NOT ALWAYS RIGHT"

[scorrpio]

If you find yourself bored like that, time to find more areas of interest. Start a home improvement project not related closely to woodworking - something that has to do with plumbing or electrical. On mine, in no time I found myself grazing on 3 different plumbing forums, an HVAC forum, two home inspection forums, countless sites selling plumbing supplies, even had a discussion with my boiler manufacturer.

Then, there are multiplayer games, which I have no time to play now, but I got 7 years of Everquest behind me. Was fun.

[leehljp]

Larry: but am inclined to distrust anything I read on the Internet until I get that second opinion.

WHAT? You mean you don't listen to my advice first time around?

I wish LOML would take your advice. Good wisdom there! ANY thing is print just HAS to be true to her because it is written!

[cwsmith]

Boring? Perhaps so! I purchase our first computer in 1979 (or was it 78'?), a long time ago anyway. It was a little Atari 800 and we hooked into the internet at 300 baud on an accoustic-coupled modem. At the time it was just plain "Wow". No graphics capability at all, but just the fact that my son could hook into the world was pretty darn neat. I remember he sat at his new computer desk and ordered his first stereo: Technics receiver, linear tracking turn-table, and Sony tape deck.

The computer for us became not so much a source for entertainment, as much as it was a tool for doing stuff. I soon found that I could communicate with the mainframe at work and it changed the way I could do parts catalogs (Technical Publications). Gone were the long 80-column data entry forms, the reams of bills of material, and the headache of dealing with keypunch cards. With the little Atari and its modem, I could download material lists, transform them into catalog pages and then send them directly to the typesetters via the phone lines. Months of work, reduced to a few days.

So much has changed since that time, but it's still pretty much a tool to keep in touch with friends, forums, and even find what movies I'm going to watch this week on TV. I've never been in a chatroom or played a game on the web, but it sure has increased my ability to keep in touch with friends, keep up with the news, and still do some freelance illustration work every now and then. Best of all, distance isn't a factor anymore and my friends can be in Moscow, London, Kuala Lumpur, or Madison.

For me anyway, I'm still excited by the ability to communicate. Unfortunately, I find it more frustrating as the dependancy on cable, web glitz, and the commercial invasion that adds cost to everything. I guess this is the price we pay for all this technological advancement.

CWS

[heavydutytools]

It was a little Atari 800 and we hooked into the internet at 300 baud on an accoustic-coupled modem.

Same here , except with an Atari 400. I think my acoustic coupled was a 110 baud. My parents would not let me dial any long distance bbs stuff , every now and then a local one would pop up for a day or two.

You wouldn't happen to have an Atari 1400XL or 1450XLD for sale would ya

[germdoc]

In the old days I was a hacker out of necessity. Using a computer was a hobby, sort of like taking pictures with an old Brownie and developing your own film. A lot of gadgets and weird software were bought on the off-chance they might "speed things up" or do something new and unusual. Some of the software--a disk partition program comes to mind--I never even got around to installing before it was obsoleted (is that a word)?

Sadly, now a computer is just a tool, kind of like a sophisticated typewriter, that I only fiddle with as a last resort. Most of the time I don't need to. MS Word and Powerpoint work just fine without tweaks, the internet is plenty fast, sound is excellent (better than my stereo, in fact).

Somehow I miss the good old days of the dual 600-kB floppy drives, with the 1200-baud modem. No windows, but several flavors of DOS. Used PCWrite as my word processor. The Kaypro we had at the time was portable--weighed 20lbs.!