And thus, My life is Virtual

Up until recently, I have been a huge fan of Microsoft Outlook(yeah yeah…I know, whatever). I liked how it let me keep pretty much my entire life in one spot: my schedule, email, contacts, notes, todo, etc. However, the other day I stumbled upon a little website called 30 Boxes. At its innermost core, 30 Boxes is a calendaring application, but in reality, it is so much more. It has a pseudo desktop view where you can access your email, todo list, facebook, flickr account, and pretty much whatever else you want to put on there. All of this would be crap however if the basic calendar sucked. Good news: it doesn’t. It has a smart entry system where I could type something like “lunch tomorrow at 1pm” and it would recognize where tomorrow is and how to place it onto the calendar correctly. It can also give you the weather forecast for several days in advance on the actual calendar itself, which is much better than having a separate widget. Needless to say, I’ve started using 30 Boxes instead of outlook and I just get all of my mail through my gmail account. I have to admit it’s pretty cool to be able to access all of this information from any computer, but now things are different. Before on outlook, I could access my calendar, todo list, and notes without being connected to the internet. Now however, I need a connection to able to access my schedule and tasks. I have always joked with my friends that I couldn’t live without the internet, but now, more than ever, I am literally in a state of absolute dependence on the internet in order to access a lot of my most important information. I know what some of you are thinking, “just start using your browser in offline mode,”which would work if it weren’t for the fact that then I can’t access my information from anywhere until I connect once again to the internet from my home computer and allow my information to update itself. Is it just me, or is anyone else bothered that the internet is no longer becoming a past time, but rather a necessity? I realize this is kind of a ridiculous question, but what if for some reason the internet ceased to exist. Millions of people would lose friends, family, jobs, even their lives(metaphorically speaking of course, as far as I know nobody’s life support is hooked into the internet…yet). There wasn’t really a point to this post, I just felt like ranting and was curious if anyone agreed with me. As always, feel free to comment!