noname01.com

How many website accounts do you have? Here is a list of mine:
GMail
Google Reader
Del.icio.us
Stumblupon
Digg
Reddit
Feedburner
Facebook
Orkut
Consumating
Twitter
MyBlogLog
Technorati
Wordpress.com
Yahoo!
Windows Live
Those are 16 which I can recall now, but I am sure there are a few more. I started using internet about 6 years ago, and now I can’t imagine living without it for a single day. A month ago when my PC’s monitor stopped working, I was on my phone’s Opera mini browser the whole day and I still felt restless so I got a new one as soon as possible. When I go to Bhatkal(my hometown), I walk one to two kilometers to the nearest internet cafe to surf! When I was in Bangalore airport waiting for my flight to Muscat and I had a couple of hours to kill, I opened up Nimbuzz on my phone and started chatting. Infact I feel a bit weird nowadays for not being able to use internet on my phone. I use Nawras over here and they have some brilliant 3.75G services, but GPRS is just too expensive if you are on prepaid.
Everyday, I go online atleast thrice and I check atleast 7 of the above accounts everyday.. And this when I am in Muscat using Omantel’s freakishly expensive dial up. When I am Bangalore, I probably spend more time online than eating or maybe even sleeping. Probably Airtel’s unlimited GPRS internet Mobile Office is to blame
Whatever, the fact is that I am hooked on! Its becoming an unhealthy addiction! Sometimes, when I am connected and I have nothing to do, I feel this restless urge to just open some page on the internet and do something, even if I really don’t feel like it!
And if you actually think about it, do we really need so many services on the internet? According to my understanding, anyone who spends more than hour on the internet everyday and not earning from it(including office work), they are wasting their time! Sounds reasonable enough, doesn’t it? Even I have finally decided to monetize this blog in the near future as there has been a BIG increase in the number of viewers I get in recent times.
But then, what would happen if I was disconnected for a couple of days? Remember the recent FLAG telecom cable cuts in the Mediterranean? It seems the outsourcing business went for a toss for a day or two before Reliance Communications got extra connectivity from elsewhere (Oman Telecommunications too!!). How can they allow some careless ship or whatever to break internet connectivity for nearly the entire country? Optical fiber cables are very fragile, and they must put in that much extra security to make sure nothing happens.
Anyway I think we have become too dependent on the internet nowadays. I am sure we can carry on working for atleast one day if we are not connected, excluding internet based businesses ofcourse. I am planning to experiment living without internet for a couple of days and see how it works out!
PS: I know that is no excuse for not posting anything here.. Sorry, was just too busy at times, and bored at other times. When something interesting happened in the Tech world or the general media, I thought of writing about them but I waited for too long and then it just became too late to comment on something that happened a month ago!
PS part 2: Do you read Techbol? We have started posting some stuff there. Do drop by sometime. I will be posting there very often now.