Disconnected

Thursday, 15th January 2009

Life can still be very different beyond the M25. I paid a rare visit to my local Coffee Republic yesterday and sat down to do some blogging using the 45 minutes of free wi-fi which came with my cappucino. "Only 45 minutes?" I said to the waitress, a sour look on my face. Wouldn't it be a good idea to entice Net users in with the promise of unlimited use? But she didn't think much of the idea, and when I looked around I noticed that I was the only person there with a laptop. Most of the other people were, ahem, talking to each other. I'd almost forgotten you could do that.

There's Twittering too, of course, but I still don't see the point. The perspicacious Ann Althouse thinks the prototypical Twitterer may have been Dave Walker, proprietor of the self-proclaimed Dullest Blog in the World, who specialized in meanderings such as this:

I noticed that after eating my lunch a tub of low fat spread remained on the kitchen work surface. It did not have a lid on. I remedied the situation by replacing the lid and returning the container to the refrigerator.

Dave used to live a few hundred yards from me. I can remember how mortified I was when I discovered the NY Times had run a feature about him. I wasn't even aware at the time that he had an online life. (He now runs a cartoon site and contributes to the Church Times.) Althouse suspects he was simply ahead of his time.