Okay, a lot of my posts these days have been about my own personal brand of heroine- my utter and absolute addiction to the web. The web is my Bella ;)

Lameness aside (and my brothers will all testify that I am lamest in the after hours), I found a cool article on Wired UK (which is even better than the regular Wired) that helps you gauge your levels of internet dependency.

According to them, here are the levels, measured by how you react when your internet suddenly dies:

Stage 1 Internet Dependency
Check the wires, see if you can steal a neighbor’s wi-fi, then get up and do something else.

Stage 2 Internet Dependency
Try to steal a neighbour’s wi-fi. Walk around the house with your laptop if necessary.

Stage 3 Internet Dependency
Try the neighbor’s wi-fi trick, making a few guesses at the passwords of their locked-down networks.
Try connecting again. And again. Try to watch a film, remember you only watch films that stream online, go back to your computer and try to connect again.

Stage 4 Internet Dependency
Shocked disbelief, followed by a thorough inspection of your network settings, DSL modem, router, wi-fi configuration and the state of local radio interference fields. Then try the neighbour’s wi-fi trick. Then stand and glare at your modem for a while.

Try connecting again. And again. Go down to watch a film, remember you only watch films that stream online, go back up and try to connect again.

Pack up your main computer and monitor and head to a hotel that offers reliable internet access.

Stage 5 Internet Dependency
Get up on the roof and point your homemade wi-fi antenna at the library 15 blocks over. If that doesn’t work, hook your phone up to your laptop. If that doesn’t work, pull out your old 56K modem and log into the dial-up service you pay for every month just in case something like this happens.

Write a long, involved blog post about how your ISP is costing you time, money and/or effort because of its incompetence.

<manual br>
:)
Sadly, I’m in stage 4. Last week our internet was gone for several days and it was torture. I tried every single trick in the book with the hardware, testing every item to extreme degrees. I’d wake up every few hours at night and check to see if it’s back through my phone’s wi-fi. I even went to sleep at EIGHT (okay, I was sick that week).

What level are you, according to this?

<manual br>

P.S. Speaking of Bella, I found another very funny article on Slate about why today’s vampires suck (I tend to disagree, I have never not loved a vampire book). An excerpt:

No, bloodsucking is so yesterday. It’s so 1994. It’s so Anne Rice. Today’s vampire is a good listener. He cares about our love lives and our problems, which is strange because we’re supposed to be his food. Humans just assume that we are the center of the universe and so, faced with a literary creation that should, by all rights, just conk us over the head and suck us down like Slurpees, we’ve decided that we’re too fascinating to be eaten. And so the modern vampire stalks, seduces, sleeps with, and cries over us. They don’t eat us.

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