This may seem odd

But I don't have interwebnetunnelhighwaystuffthing here at home, It costs money, of which I have very little. What I do instead is take advantage of the intertubenetweb services paid for by family, friends, the local library, and neighbors. I do this under the rubric of “dog-sitting”, or “keeping an eye on the place whilst you're out of town”.

Not wanting to wear out my welcome, my system is simple. Rightclicksavepagefolderonlinestuff. It's actually as fast if not faster than RSS feed, and I don't have to go through the mail provider's searchbots. I've got maybe 250 bookmarks in perhaps a dozen folders, plus a dedicated folder for new links. (Hit link, opens as new tab, new tab has HTTP, bookmark in “new stuff” folder, or whatever I'm calling it today).

Some stuff gets saved – bus routes and schedules, ampacity charts, NEMA plug standards, downloaded literachoor (I tend to use PDF, 'cause the Kindle Reader sucks).

But this is all by the way. I had an old buddy of mine as a sofa critter for entirely too long. He thought that I was holding out on him when I brought up a PDF of a bus route. “NO” I told him, “This is just a saved file!!” This is a guy who has been a computer programmer since the days of fucking PUNCHCARDS. (Well, I am too, but he's older than I am. I mean, like, I remember using tape cassettes and frisbee sized disks).

This is the thing: Keep it local. Compact storage is the way to go. Don't just rad, download. Store it. Ther's a buttload of stuff that I have copypastaed copy pasted onto an Open Office doc. Every ISP sucks and will have down/slow times. Keep what you need on hand.

For that matter, it might not be a bad idea to have a backup. Micro SD chips. Spare laptop. Faraday cage protected. Seriously. The local transformer going boom could destroy your Great American Novel, or your grand new prooof of the exceptions to the General Theory of Revativity.

I recall visiting me old budy John as a storm blew up. He was writing code for the operation of the brand new thing called the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Sensor. (MRI, for those are more comfortable with the TLA). “Damn, John, shouldn't you save work?” Lightning hit he house next door, blacking out the neighborhood.

“Done it once and it took me 50 hours. Now I know how to do it I can do it in 3. Shit. Lights are out. Calls for Wild Turkey. Y”all got a joint? Wow, and here's some acid I had saved for a special occasion. Let's go watch the weather”.