Since I have no internet access at home, my only connection to the Internet is at a local public access site. Fortunately I have found one with non-diskless workstations, i.e. diskette drives that aren't absent or somehow "dis-enabled." "Unfortunately," I haven't yet found one that supports read/write portable media any larger (in capacity) than a 1.44MB floppy. The word "unfortunately" is "quoted" for a kind of de-emphasis because I don't believe in looking a gift horse in the mouth. In a pick one universe, I'd pick a CD-RAM over a DVD-ROM, but who am I to say that the needs (or should I say interests) of vagrant netizens outweigh those of, say, starving film studies majors?

Since I usually find it convenient enough to keep a 10-pack of floppies in my purse, and I can usually find my way to the public access site once every 1-2 weeks (let's split the diff and call it 1.5 weeks on average) I calculate (guesstimate) the average rate of data transfer between myself and the Internet at (hold onto your lidar gun) 133 bits per second.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that my appetites in online content tend toward the textual, factual and sign-ificant as contrasted with the multimedia, disinformational and noisy (or noificant). Although my age (40, the "age of reason" according to Sartre) makes me a "leading edge baby boomer," my level of informational sophistication is still at the pre-television stage.