Monday, April 16, 2007

A week without the Internet

Moving to a new place can present its challenges, but technology dependency has raised the bar in challenge impact. For instance, our new home is located next to a large hill, and although this hill is beautifully covered in untamed vegetation that is relaxing to gaze upon from our back yard, we have terrible cell phone reception! So, since we're of the ilk that abandoned the land line in favor of having low doses of RF* beamed at our heads on a daily basis, I now miss most of my phone calls. In addition, we took our time transferring our cable internet connection from old abode to new--thus another level of technological isolation! How am I to know what my friends are doing, blogging, thinking, reading? I can't call, I can't e, I've lost any intuitive abilities, such as those ascribed to the aboriginals in Mutant Message (of course this happened long before cell phones and internet), and to top it all off, the LA times didn't get my change of address notification because I forgot and I couldn't get online, and . . .

It was really terrible. I had to read books, play with by baby more, unpack my boxes uninterrupted by my life as I know it, and life as it is filtered to me through media. Hmmm . . . perhaps I enjoyed this low tech experience.

*RF, Radio Frequency. Exposure limits are set by the FCC for cell phones, using a measurement called a Specific Absorption Rate, or SAR, which measure sthe rate of absoprtion of RF energy by the human body expressed in units of watts per kilogram. The safety limit for a human is 1.6 watts per kilogram. I wonder how many kilograms my baby weighs and what is his SAR of RF. Perhaps its a good thing our new home has poor reception.

Signing Off.

2 comments:

Chryss said...

Welcome back! We missed you!

Erika said...

Hi Noelle, My name is Erika Brown and I am currently working on an awareness campaign called Infected Or Not.

Let me tell you a little bit about it. The whole story of this campaign began with a report from a Panda Software project. On that report, PandaLabs stated that in 2006 more malware was received than in the previous 15 years combined.

The spread of malware infections was huge and it is now getting worse and worse. And that’s why Panda Software decided to launch their Infected Or Not campaign.

The campaign is based on the www.infectedornot.com web site. On that site, people can quickly check if their computers are infected by any form of malware and, at the same time, they are providing useful information that is collected and used to present prevalence statistics.

So the real value of the campaign is not in the test drive of the upcoming Panda detection tools, but in the stats collected by these tests (stats that are also displayed daily on the web site). So far, the numbers have beenereally impressive: almost 70% of the scanned computers are infected. That is precisely why we need awareness.

Now, This is what I want to ask you: I would like you to publish an article in your web site about this campaign. I can even send you one of several different articles written by other people working on this campaign. Any mention about “Infected Or Not” from any web site is, subsequently, commented and seen by hundreds of thousands of people in our own web site. I guess the free publicity couldn’t hurt you.

I know it doesn’t sound like a great deal for you but, if you think about it, we would provide you with relevant (and rich in keywords) content, and you would be taking part on this awareness effort.

If you want to collaborate with me, just write back and let me know. I will send you the article ASAP.

Thanks for your time and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best regards
e.erika.brown@gmail.com