Domus ex Machina

With computer in hand, it’s like I never left home.
Leaving from Austin yesterday morning, my family’s been driving up to Toronto to visit family and see how things are going. In the past, I always remember the road trips being a serious drag. Little space, little to do, long hours staring out the window, bored out of my gourd. Not so this time.
Perhaps with what little I’ve matured, I’m also more patient and able to keep myself entertained. But I think a large part of it is having my computer with me. I can do my work when I want to, watch DVDs, and connect to the internet at night thanks to the popularity of having wireless networks at hotels.
It’s definitely nice. Today, we’re wired enough that even when we go on vacations, we never really have to leave our life behind. Instead of giving a neighbor hotel phone numbers, we have our cell phones, which allowed for a quizzical call earlier if I wanted to hang out back in Houston, hundreds of miles away.
Email keeps me in touch with my personal life, and the internet can flood me with information, whether at home or on the road.
It’s made me wonder how much of a vacation this is. With my computer in tow, I’m not really leaving at all. But I guess everyone has their own sense of vacation. I’ve recently read a couple articles on the so-called “information overload”, as we take in all of the information of the internet daily. I’ve watched as that’s crept up for me over the past year. When I began, my feed aggregator had maybe 10 feeds. Now I’m looking at 80+, which is bound to grow as I find more and more information I must keep up with.
So this one goes out to you guys: do I need a break from the internet and life, or do I keep chugging away, situation normal?

And sorry I never did the Bourne review. I got caught up in some stuff, and by the time I sat down to write it, I forgot too much.