Revolutions On The Road

I almost miss the bad old days. When I first started wandering around some of the more obscure nooks and crannies of this planet, lo these many years ago, Internet connections were rare and wonderful discoveries; now I just get annoyed when I can't get online. The last decade-and-a-half of innovation has completely transformed the experience of travel. Right now I'm in the middle of a four-continents-in-six-weeks jaunt, from Canada to East Africa to Europe to India, and thanks to all my tech gear, life on the road is almost unrecognizably different from that of fifteen years ago. The biggest change this trip has been my ebook reader. I have a Kobo. There is much about my Kobo that I really don't like: its interface is clumsy and confusing; anything other than straight front-to-back reading is intensely frustrating; it can only use completely open wireless connections, so any wi-fi network with a login or click-to-agree-terms button is completely useless to me; and when I do connect, attempts to download new books fail approximately 50% of the time. But they do succeed the other 50%, meaning I've read nine books in the last month, and was able to buy and download books via ambient wi-fi in Kenya and Djibouti, which did feel like living in the future. There are also subtler and more negative repercussions.

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