Yours truly is on the tail end of a week that proved the limits to blogging for someone on the move. I drove from San Diego to Santa Rosa on Sunday, and was able to post from my motels en route there and while there, and do slated shows. But in each instance, the “yes we have it!” hotel connections were hard to connect to.
Fast foward to Tuesday, when I headed from Santa Rosa to a town near Eugene, Oregon, to continue my school tour. I was unable to post or even get on my site, really, for two days since the only thing available was dial-up — hideously slow. This is the first time in several days that I am truly online…and this time (after driving the first 500 miles of a 1000 mile drive home) by staying at at Holiday Inn Express, picked specifically so I could KNOW I would get online easily (and Holiday Inn is always true to its name on internet reliability).
I’m only now getting caught up on posts on this site and others. I may face a similar situation in Connecticut next week. We’re basically still in the Fred Flintstone age of computers, the Internet and blogging itself so if you’re on the move, be prepared to face days when you may not be able to easily get online. Or if you do, it could be snail-paced dial up. (Cagle Cartoons could not be posted the past few days and will resume soon).
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.