MiFi.

It is mid-morning, and I am not quite smiling. But close. Coffee is brewing. I am testing out Verizon's MiFi Wireless Hotspot device, which may be the missing link connecting this household to the World Wide Web. We shall see.

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Update, June 2019.

Reading the above, from 2009, is surreal. There was a point where we didn’t have internet. I had shared office space 20 minutes away downtown for a while. I’d go work evenings and nights, hop on Facebook a couple times a week, etc. We didn’t have internet at home. So when we got this little device that let us get two gigabytes of monthly internet access on our mountaintop home…it was incredible.

Also, hard to wrap your mind around now. We are so used to ubiquitous connection. We walk into a restaurant or coffeeshop or business or somebody’s home and expect to have wireless, gratis. Sort of like asking for a cup of water.

“Of course everywhere I go, I’ll be able to get clean drinking water,” is the unthought expectation.

And now it is such with wifi. We simply expect it to be there. Waiting for us, available at our whim.

But once upon a time, not so long ago, there were corded phones and faxes, dial-up modems and AOL CDs, floppy disks in two different sizes, and…

…a little magical device for getting internet on a rural mountaintop. A device that seems quaint and archaic now.

Like much of technology.

How short our memories are.