How
the Internet Changed my Life
By
Kalkidan Amare
AAU
For
me, my day begins not at 6.A.M in the morning as I reluctantly
get up to face the customary ritual of shave , brush and breakfast,
nor does it start at 8AM when I sit my self at my desk on the
first floor of the office building where I work and prepare to
tackle the 8 hours ahead of me with as much vigor as I can muster
( but I do enjoy my working day in case you, dear readers, are
one of my bosses.) My day takes off when I return home and after
the usual banter and chat with my family, retire to the privacy
of my bedroom which in its ever littered confined holds my most
prized possession: MY OWN COMPUTER. Prized not for the money I
paid for it (and it was no chickenfeed, either) but prized instead
for the one thing it can offer me. You may call it the Internet;
I call it my gateway into cyber Utopia!
Plug
in the main power cable, fire up the voltage stabilizer, push
the power on button, and wait until the familiar blue, red, green
and white image of Windows XP comes up along with a dialogue box
asking for my password. Then I type ******, press enter and hear
the delightful chime. Okay. Now to my dial-up connection. Comes
out a little scrap of paper that bears today’s username
and password (don’t ask me how I got it) and I type, swiftly,
click connect ad wait, drumming my finger impatiently. My model
emits the all-so-familiar click clacks and oh, what do you know,
its connecting! After only three trials the gods must be smiling
on me today. I whip up my browser, and sure enough the Yahoo main
page, my default homepage, appears and so does a smile on my face.
I am in.
Ever
since I first used the Internet four years ago I’ve been
in love and things have never been the same. What thing? Everything!
Suddenly the rest of the world became only a few keystrokes and
clicks away, unimaginably huge archives and databases were at
my fingertips, all the miles between me and my friends abroad
shrank into nothing; in short i became conected! Still don’t
follow? Well, take a little cyber trip with me and you will see
what I mean.
First order of business, check my mailbox. The traditional way?
Not me! From my desktop I seek out a Yahoo! Messenger icon, type
in my User ID & password to log on. Okay, one of my cousins
is online, and I have three new messages. I selected the ‘go
to my messages” option to open my inbox. Meanwhile, I double
– click on my cousin’s name and a dialogue box opens
creating a hotline between us. We begin to chat...” so,
how was your day?” he asks. Here are my mails. My aunt says
thank you for the birthday card I sent her (electronic, of course),
one of my friends wants to know how my day the previous day went,
and a match has been found for the scholarship search initiated
some time ago. Yes, you can do that! Why waste time chasing links
after links till your eyes get sore? There are lots of websites
for this purpose, just choose the one you like, give them details
about yourself and your academic background and if and when a
match is found it will be delivered to your mailbox. I eagerly
open it, fingers crossed. Hmmmmm!! Available course: Theology.
A long list of unthinkable requirements followed. I’d rather
wait. Grab the mouse, click delete, gone. A few lines to my friend
and aunty and I’m done with my mail. See? No more agonizing
wait for weeks, no more trips to the post office (and none of
that intolerable frisking at the gates.) Good news, bad news,
any news from anywhere delivered right to the comfort of my chair.
God bless the Net!
A brief
note about myself. Aside from being a civil servant, I’m
a third year student at the AAU, studying Information systems
(night classes). Being such a one, the Internet is all about something
which is near and dear to my heart: INFORMATION. I don’t
just mean the sheer volume of it. But imagine the content! From
the favorite sport of Algae to how the universe is going to end,
it leaves no topic uncovered. Text, pictures, audio, video, you
name it, it’s got it. All you need to do is look for it.
For instance I was given a reading assignment on the Shanno-Weaver
communication model earlier this evening. Normally, this meant
spending hours at the library riffling through pages till my fingerprints
faded. Not any more. There are plenty of search engines on the
web just for such a task, but I prefer Google. I type Google on
the address bar of my browser window, press CTRL+Enter ad I am
at the home page. To save time, I always use filters to refine
my search. Using the advanced search model I commad it to look
only for documents containing the exact phrase above and also
some key words, and ask it to show me only the ten most relevant
results. And there they come listed by order of relevance. A quick
look at the first one, a sizeable PDF file and it looks good.
So I download it. Anything from research papers to book reviews,
excerpts from news letters, publications, documents relating to
practically anything that you might thinkof can be found here.
And its for free!
My
leisure times are leisurely, too! I can see how my favorite socceer
team is doing, read their latest match review and which player
is in scandal currently. I can find out what movies will soon
be released, who is starring in them, what the movies are all
about and even watch trailers. If I fancy some music, no problem!
Just run a search using the title and get a list of sites I can
download it from. I can ever get the lyrics to go with it, so
that I can sing along. Best of all, I can try the crossword puzzles
(my all- time favorite) daily at Herald Tribune.com, even check
the cartoons section to see what mischief Garfield the cat has
been up to lately. What if i had no software on my computer that
supports the PDF file I downloaded earlier? Nullo impedimentum!
At downloads.com(and a number of other sides)you can find virtually
any kind of software to buy or for free. Audio players,video players
encoders, compressors, drivers, gams and lot more of other software
whose uses I don’t know, all there for the taking.
If
you are a news buff like myself, you will not be disappointed.
Who needs radio and Tv? BBC, CNN or others, take your pick. Middle
east peace talks, floods in Asia, wildfire in Australia, elections
in Africa or demonstrations in South America, news or bizarre
incidents from all corners of the world kept updated to the minute.
Ican even browse their archives to look up anything that’s
been news at some moment in the past.Should it be my wish,Ican
select some subject of interests and have any news regarding it
sent to my mailbox.
As
if all this is not enough, there is one more domain I’ve
been privileged to access: Chat room. Not only do I get to keep
in touch with friends and relatives abroad but I also get to make
new friends from all walks of life. I have this Chinese friend
who’s always trying to make me see Asian wisdom and change
my main diet to rice, another one in Brazil who sends me pictures
of carnivals, an Australian who studies physics and has some very
interesting theories about UFO’s and many more. I finally
even got to ask an Indian why they wobble their heads while speaking.
He didn’t know. They all know me as a man of many faces.
Yet, they have made me a part of their lives, and privy to rare
glimpses at how people so much more different than me see life.
Bottom
line, adding the pros and slashing the cons, what it comes down
to is the Internet has shown me new, easy ways to now more, and
knowing that I can know more, has made me want to know more, and
I have, and do! I have been empowered to see and learn all about
the place I might never go to, people I might never get to meet,
and things I probably won’t ever do. I’ve been able
to make friends thousands of miles away who have made me see the
world in more colors than I used to. It has brought a welcome
change to my life, if I could change anything, I wouldn’t
want things any different. ˜
