I honestly don’t know how I went this long without it. I’d been hearing all of the hype and rumors about it for years now, but nothing quite compares to trying it for yourself. They say once you try it, you’ll be hooked for life and I must say that I’ll agree. This Christmas I found my savior – it came in the form of a small, grey box made by RCA…

That’s right, I finally took the plunge and upgraded to a broadband Internet connection at my house, quite possibly making it the best home improvement step I’ve ever made! You could probably consider me one of the original Internet geeks, ranging back to the times of telnet and gopher, when a graphical interface was nothing more than a wet dream. The first time I connected to the Internet was sometime in the early 1990s; I was only about 11 years old or so. We didn’t really even know what this Internet-thing was all about, but after months and months of pleading I finally convinced my Dad to let me try it out. We only had a 1200 baud modem (translate: r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w…) and the computer itself was a “laptop” that could maybe display four or five lines at a time, so there wasn’t much to see…

Obviously things have drastically changed since then and the entire concept of the World Wide Web has been completely altered to now accommodate graphics, music and even animation. Am I the only person who remembers Lynx??? Ok, those days pretty much sucked and we knew it, but at least you could view the full potential of a text-based Internet over a dial-up connection using it. Nowadays it’s not uncommon to be able to take your lunch break and return to find that the page which you were attempting to load before you left is still loading…I hate to use such a cliché, but does the term World Wide Wait ring a bell?

I had used “permanent” Internet connections in other places before, mainly businesses and schools, but trust me, this doesn’t even come close to having a real connection! Besides, who wants to look at porn in the middle of the campus computer lab, anyways? Let me tell you, the difference in speed makes surfing the Internet an entirely new (and even tolerable!) experience! There’s certainly no more waiting for those dirty pictures of Anne Heche to load, or so I’ve heard…

Anyone who uses the Internet for anything more than checking e-mail once a week owes it to themselves to invest in broadband, whether it be via cable modem or DSL. If you live in that rural of an area where it still isn’t available, then I suggest that you either move or start making daily phone calls to your local cable company until they bite the bullet and realize that it would be cheaper to run a special line out to your house rather than keep an extra person on staff just to answer your phone calls! And ladies, even though you think that your man is only using the ‘net to look up sports scores and stuff, he’ll definitely appreciate the increase in his ability to download pornography, too! He’s going to look at it regardless, so why not speed up the whole process a little? You know what they say: What’s better than downloading your porn 10 times faster? Downloading your porn 100 times faster, of course! Hmmmm, 100 times faster…

The truly addictive part of the upgrade was that I didn’t just get the cable modem. Oh no, the package also came complete with digital cable as well, which as any couch potato knows is the next best thing to having an actual life! Some may call it the poor man’s satellite (although after seeing the bill, I couldn’t imagine why…), but 250 channels is good enough for me, at least for now! I’ve got over 50 different movies I’ve already seen and another several dozen sitcoms I couldn’t care less about available at my fingertips at any given time, not to mention the specialty channels such as Animal Planet, Discovery’s Animal World, The Science Channel presents Animals, Disney’s Animal Kingdom Live and The Spice Channel…

I figure between cable tv and my laptop with Internet access, there’s really no reason for me to ever have to leave the couch now. I do get hungry from time to time, but if I leave a trail of money by the door, the pizza delivery boy will usually catch on and bring it right to me. I’m still working on a solve for the whole bathroom-thing because I just don’t have good enough aim to use the empty beer bottles and I definitely won’t be trying the diaper thing again…

If the last bit made it sound like I was a little lazy, that’s not my intention at all because in real life I’m actually extremely lazy! And you know what, I really have no problems with that – They say I’m lazy, but it takes all my time – words spoken by a true man. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a little downloading to do…