Staying connected all the time

“It’s long distance!” used to tell you the call was important. When making a Christmas long distance call, you were connected from operator to operator. It often took several attempts. Now we can dial anywhere in the world and can expect someone to answer. In our household the timer was set on the stove to tell us when to hang up because long distance was expensive.
With one son living in Korea, we now rely on Skype to keep in contact. Skype and other internet calling services allow us to talk anytime and for almost free. And we can do it face to face because of the internet.
Mondays always seem to arrive with the unknown facing the newspaper. For no apparent reason, gremlins seem to play havoc with the internet and with the documents that we receive for the newspaper. This Monday was no different.
The General Motors Chevy ad that appears in this week’s paper arrived on Mac desktops without the Chevrolet logo appearing. Magically it had disappeared. Yet when the same identical document was opened on a PC desktop, it was there in its full glory. There was no explanation. We discovered the problem shortly after eight in the morning when we went to print the Atikokan Progress paper.
Within an hour, papers across Ontario were also calling the creative house that produced the ad to let them know that they too had a problem with the ad. It took an hour to fix the problem, and the creative house in Toronto eventually solved the problem.
Over the Christmas weekend, we had LAN switch die in the newspaper. Arriving on the Monday after the Christmas weekend, I was surprised to discover over a dozen computers telling me that they couldn’t talk to the network or to the internet. It was disturbing. As I began trying to solve the problem, I felt confused. Some computers in one part of the building would work. In other parts, the computers were blind to the world.
The switch had just died. Half of our staff was going to be disconnected from our network.
Fortunately, we have seen this problem before, and have kept a spare installed on the rack for just such an emergency. It took only a matter of minutes to have everything talking once again.
In today’s world if you are not connected to the outside world, you almost feel lost. The internet has both isolated more people and connected more people at the same time. Canadians spend more time connected to the internet than people of any other nation in the world.
We use up more bandwidth per capita than any other group nation. It is now bothering internet providers. Our connectedness keeps growing and the use of computers, computer tablets, smart phones, and other electronic gadgets provide us with more options to use the internet. We rely on the internet for phones, for mail, for ordering, for movies and to receive music and listen to radio stations out of our area.
It seems to affect everything we do, and we when are not connected we feel lost.

–Jim Cumming,
Publisher