Dial up!

This weekend I visited my brother in SoCal and was fortunate enough to tote along an old-school iPhone 2G. I must admit that traveling with an iPhone made the usual frustrations of travel such as airport waits or transfer downtimes unusually enjoyable. But most of the enjoyment came from the books I had downloaded onto my Barnes & Noble eReader and Amazon Kindle software for the iPhone. The dial-up-modem-like speeds of the original iPhone are nothing to brag about, and their main benefit was to help me appreciate the cable connection once back at home or to reminisce on the good ol' days of early college, when simply having a dial-up Internet connection was worth writing home about.

And speaking of college Internet, I came across a news article from today entitled: "Your fastest Internet in the world is found in Berkeley, CA":

Those three spots are Berkeley (average speed: 18.7Mbps), Chapel Hill, North Carolina (average speed: 17.5Mbps), and Stanford, California (average speed: 17.0Mbps).

There's something beautiful about a campus whose student-run computing facility rivals entire IT organizations from other other universities. Now if only San Francisco could connect the Bay Area campus triangle of Internet splendor...