Visiting family can be a mixed blessing if you live a completely wired life. Sure, it's nice be around relatives. The embarrassing stories about your childhood, the delicious meals, the annual touch football game that will inevitably lead to your uncle walking with a limp for the rest of the weekend.
Still, with all that family fun, you're going to get the itch. The itch to check your email, to update your Facebook status, to check your favorite website (wink wink). Here are a few tips to help you get through the weekend with your tech addiction in check.
Wi-Fi in the Boonies
We don't all have the power of the iPhone in our pockets, or swanky EVDO cards sitting in our backpacks. Once we leave our homes, the internet might as well be a myth without open Wi-Fi. We've spent countless hours in our families' homes walking from room to room waving our laptops in the air trying desperatley to find an open Wi-Fi connection.
Instead of trying to borrow the neighbors internet connection, you have a few options.
If your family has broadband, but not Wi-Fi, you can bring your router. This is probably a pain if you've created the perfect network closet at home, and now you have to pull out the heart. But desperate times call for for desperate measures. Once you have the router setup, you can amaze them with the networking possibilities a router brings. They may be so amazed that they'll just pick up their own router on Black Friday.
A better option is using old hardware. If you have an old Wi-Fi router lying around--maybe an 802.11b or g router from a few years ago--you can put it to good use by leaving it with your family. They'll be wireless, and when you visit, you'll have the internet you can't live without.
If your family doesn't have internet access, many ISPs have dial-up access numbers you can utilize with your modem. Unfortunately, MacBooks from the past couple years don't have internal modems. If you have one of those machines, you can purchase Apple's USB Modem ($49). Of course, purchasing a $50 cable to use the internet--very slow internet at that--seems like a little much.
The Greatest Show on Earth
If you're tired of the same 5 DVDs at family gatherings, you have three choices. You can gather up DVDs from your personal collection, you can burn copies of your DVDs so your precious collection doesn;t get scratched by the multitude of children at family gathers, or you get a iPod/iPhone Composite AV cable ($49) and fill your iPod/iPhone with videos from iTunes, or rip DVDs for the trip. You can call up other tech savvy family members and have them bring their iPod/iPhones filled with videos and you can finally retire the yearly Iron Eagle viewing.
In the end, it's probably best that you unhook yourself for a few days and enjoy the company of your family. It's only four days. Well, at least until next month.
