Surfing with the Flintstones

After a short night of little sleep, we were up and getting ready for the day. I had forgotten how small Idaho Falls was. While growing up there, it always seemed like the big city. After all, it was the third largest city in Idaho with a population of 40,000 people. We even had three high schools and four bowling alleys. It didn't get much bigger than that. Somehow though, the state of Idaho seems to have missed the technological revolution. Instead of keeping up with the necessary infrastructure to take advantage of the Internet, they seemed to be left behind. Until recently, no one even knew the Internet existed. I had worked feverishly to try and find a network connection that would allow me to connect in. The need for the Internet was never more important. When I picked up the morning newspaper, I immediately turned to the sports page to collect information on what had happened the previous night in Major League Baseball. You can imagine my horror to find that the sports page consisted of two pages and one of them was filled with fishing forecasts! How could these barbarians possibly live not knowing how the Diamondbacks had done? After several phone calls and configuration changes, I finally got my laptop connected to the web. My usually reliable 56K modem was able to connect at 21.6 maximum. I may has well be using a modemsaurus and trying to raise Barney Rubble on the other end. There is nothing quite as frustrating as watching the screen paint when you are trying to pull up the box score on ESPN.com. This was going to be a very long week for me. My digital cellular phone has not been operational since Utah, my pager has no service, my parents idea of a cable modem is what connects the computer to the telephone jack, and this city's idea of big league baseball is watching Rookie level Pioneer League teams. I am beginning to think perhaps I have gone back in time to the 1950s.