My week online

Who would have guessed just 20 years ago that the internet was going to become a substitute for your little trip to the market for some milk, or your career as an international celebrity? I think that the amount of activities we do online these days is so amazing that we have actually created a dependency that in some cases seems like an actual drug. One of the most generalized symptoms now a days is the "new mail" symptom. If you are one of us, you are probably not surprised to know about this sort of anxiety that overcomes your life when you haven't checked your email for two days. It is very interesting and very scary.
This is what I do: I have gathered all my emails into one spot, thunderbird...where I download all from three different accounts to minimize the effort. And this thunderbird from Mozilla is a portable version that I can plug in with my flash-drive anywhere with the internet on. (For those of you who want to know further uses of the flash drive...click here)
So this week I have visited 4 online stores for a variety of reasons, 5 different online newspapers, half a dozen of my favorite blogs, and about a hundred sites looking for different answers I have plugged into the google search bar. I have accessed the internet using my laptop at school, at home, at the coffee shop, and I have used my cell phone service to check the weather or the email when laptop is not around.
Another interesting fact about my computer experience overall is that I'm slowly in the process of abandoning the monopoly of Microsoft and Apple and I am converting all my systems to the most digestible forms of linux...which is a completely free operating system with a strong sense of community called Ubuntu, which is also the name of an African philosophy that reminds me about what technology could mean for us if we really wanted to:
"A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed."