Ever since my flight to Austin I have been suffering from an uneasy feeling of disconnectivity. The eight hour flight was the longest I have been "offline" for a long time. Five hours into the flight I was sure i started feeling physical symptoms of withdrawal from the Internet. I was very unsettled, couldn't concentrate and was rather grumpy (ok, grumpier than I usually am!).

Forced disconnection with the grid made me realise how much of my life, both business and personal is played out online. Convinced that all would be back to normal as soon as I landed in the great US of A, I managed to struggle through the flight, iPhone in hand, even though it was little more than an expensive tv remote, for the duration.

An even bigger surprise was just passed the immigration checkpoints. I had assumed (never been to America before!) that I would be walking into a wifi saturated zone, with companies fighting for every inch of space in their quest to dominate in the connectivity race! How wrong was I, with more physical space to cover it seems that there is even less overlapping connectivity than back home. What had started as irritating and mildly unsettling on the flight turned into a daily, stressful ritual of hunting down wifi enabled coffeshops or businesses so I could remain in contact and up to date with what was going on. Over the course of the two weeks I was there, the search for connectivity seemed to take up more and more of my "headspace", becoming like a addict cut off from their regular supply, I found myself looking in windows as I walked past, searching for the ever elusive "wifi here" signs, rather than taking in the awesome Austin scenery and enjoying my time off as a first time tourist in America. Choosing places to eat, based on the availability of wifi rather than the menu.

I was prepared for the flight back, making sure I had loaded many webpages and links into memory on both my laptop and iPhone. Not enough to fill the entire flight but enough to stave off the onset of withdrawal.

The last 3 weeks since I have been back have done nothing to quiet this unsettled feeling. The internet at home has been almost non-existent, forcing us to go online with a 3G Dongle at times. Then there's the office... Oh my god!...
Our BT Internet connection is so slow that you are unable to download your mail and anything with more to it than a Google search page makes it fall over. Our shared connection for uploading has also been experiencing problems and seems to only get a signal if you are sitting in front of the gents toilet door on the top floor. I am too old to be sitting cross legged on the floor with my laptop on my lap.

The guys have been moving routers, repeaters and access points around all day in the hope that we can find the problem and get things back to some semblance of normality, I think they are starting to fear for their lives, cowering in the face of my unbridled wrath, lest it be turned from the gods of the Internets onto them!

The only thing to break through my mood has been my iPad and my cradlepoint router. When the grid fails me elsewhere I am virtually guaranteed to find my fix here. To me this is a game changing device.

"It's a tool for consumption", many reviews use this as a negative point when taking about the device. To me it's a massive bonus! Sometimes all I want to do is consume. Taking my laptop home with all my media digitised makes it too easy to ignore the kids and my duties at home for a "I'll just quickly do this". There is always something to be done, tweaked or polished. The iPad allows me to keep up to date, surf all those links you want to surf from the couch whilst watching Telly without the ability and therefore the temptation to catch up on a few hours of work.

I'm really looking forward to using it more and finding new ways that it can help me work smarter and leaner. Also, once we have solved our Internet problems altogether I am looking forward to a few hours of downtime playing Pocket Legends on a larger screen than the iPhone! :-) Sent from my iPad