A Morton's Fork

Updates have been a little slow recently, partly because of late hours at work but also because our home internet connection has been flaky recently.  It's been cutting in and out, with outages lasting from minutes to up to hours at some points.  It's been a little frustrating and it's made me realize how much we depend on the Internet.

I remember first learning about the Internet and being able to go online when I was in high school.  At that point, it was using a modem to dial into the local university bulletin board service and then using Lynx as a crude text browser.  You had to wait until no one was using the phone line so you could dial in with your modem (some of my dedicated friends even got a second phone line to use with just their computer!)  When Mosaic and Netscape first came out, it was a revelation of colors, blinking text, and midi music as the idea of home pages exploded.  Since then, it's been an exponential increase in the rise of the Internet.  I was able to get my first taste of high speed internet access at college, where all of the dorm rooms had ethernet wired in.  In grad school, I was able to escape the anchor of having a heavy desktop computer with the freedom of a laptop and wireless internet access.  And in the last couple of years, mobile computing with smart phones and tablets has exploded.

During this evolution, the Internet has taken over more and more of our lives.  We manage most of our financial and shopping online now, as well as most of our personal and social networking.  We download news and upload our ideas.  It's come to the point where people have been diagnosed with Internet addiction---they can't turn it off.  This was the unenviable pedestal that television had reigned over for decades.  Hours spent staring at the television screen has been replaced with staring at computer and phone screens.

So, now which would you rather choose?  A life without television or the Internet?

Well, with our flaky internet connection, we now had to face that dilemma, that Morton's Fork or even Sophie's Choice.  We had been using a cable splitter to connect our television and cable modem to the same line, weakening the signal.  While our television was okay, it wasn't enough signal for our cable modem to use.  It turned out that if we cut out the splitter and hooked the cable modem up directly, we got a robust signal and internet access at the cost of our television.  You could only have one without the other.  So now we had to choose---television or internet access?  The real answer:  get Comcast out here to fix the problem (woohoo, deus ex machina!)