For the last two weeks, I've been living in the past, accessing the Web and e-mail through a dial-up connection over a hardwired network. No cable modem. No DSL. No wireless. Just a low-speed 33kps modem connection that drops out every 20 minutes or so.

It's a frustrating and eye-opening experience: after years of having a high speed internet connection and a go-anywhere wireless network at home, I had forgotten what it was like to live in a place without ubiquitous net access.

Take e-mail for example. Over the two weeks I've been on vacation, I've received over 2500 e-mails to my main Nuketown account, and probably another thousand or so to my myriad other Nuketown addresses. That's a lot of e-mail, and the vast majority of it is junk. At home, junk mail is annoying, but its not fatal: my e-mail program's filtering capabilities kill most of it, leaving only a few dozen for me to have to deal with. On the road though, it's hell. I don't have direct access to the net via my iBook, and thus, I have to deal with all the junk mail myself. And browsing through all that crap just to find a few gems is a time consuming process that's largely a futile exercise; finding the important stuff is just too damn hard.

E-mail aside, when writing -- be it a blog entry like this, or a review for Nuketown -- I'm used to being able to fire up a browser on my Mac and instantly summon up whatever information I wanted, be it Amazon links, word definitions, or queries about ideas that struck me as interesting. And that's all gone. My Mac and its ever-so-cool Dashboard -- with its near-realtime baseball scores, TV schedule and weather -- has been lobotomized.

I'd forgotten that folks used to call the Web the World Wide Wait, but after spending a few minutes browsing my favorite sites, the joke struck home once again. When you're on dial-up, the Web is a seek-and-find tool; you have to be focused, or you'll spend hours waiting ... and waiting ... and waiting. Idle surfing -- just sitting in front of the TV and checking out random sites while watching a baseball game -- just doesn't happen.

And it's not just me. Even Sue, my organic-loving, wilderness education instructing wife pines for our old set-up, admitting that yes, she does miss browsing the web wirelessly on our laptop.

Living in dial-up land isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's nice to get away form the computer for a while, and dial-up land helps keep us off the Web. But while it's a nice place to visit, I sure wouldn't want to live there.