You are reading this with a pretty good computer. It is highly portable (weighing just 3 pounds), draws little power, has a lot of
memory, is adept at pattern recognition, and has the ability -- unique so far among all computing entities -- to generate and process
natural languages. All this and stereo sound, too. On the downside, it is terribly slow (just a few floating-point calculations a
second), it's down for at least a third of every day, and its software is full of bugs, despite having spent the last quarter of a
million years in beta. Nevertheless, this computer -- the human brain -- has always been the gold standard.
I always want to be more wired than I am... but I think I already qualify for citizenship in the digital nation. I imagine I am part of
that elite top one percent of the world population that has too much Internet access to begin with. I have eight accounts in five
states.
And, to add to that confusion, I have my own domain name. Yes, I'm the proud owner and operator of smargon.net. (I would have taken smargon.com, but that aforementioned plastics company
grabbed it first.)
As far as finding things on the 'Net, I use four indices and two search engines (for now). The indices are Yahoo, About.com, Wikipedia, and the Librarians' Index to the Internet. The
engines are Google and A9 (a subsidiary of Amazon.com).
And for finding people on the 'Net, I use five people finders: Yahoo! People Search, Google, Switchboard, the Anywho Online Directory (brought to you by the folks at AT&T), and
Eliyon BusinessPeople Search. (This lets you search for people and
their affiliations to companies and organizations.) The reverse-lookup features at Google and the
Anywho Online Directory are especially helpful.
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