This is my winter desk. It’s the same year-round, but for most of the year, the warmer, outdoors part, it’s just a chair in front of a computer where I pop in to check stuff. In the winter, it becomes a mildly monkish workstation, a place to be a bit of a modern DIY scholar and scribe… To someone who’s loved books and reading from way early on, the Web is a completely over-the-top place. Billions of people surf around, but I wonder how many have a first-hand inkling of HOW MUCH STUFF IS REALLY IN THERE. It has EVERYTHING, just kinda piled up, like an endless, fantastically-stocked, 24/7 garage sale of ideas to put in your head. I don’t know if it’s ultimately a good thing, this type of extreme abundance, but it sure is interesting. And great for looking into things. So, I spend a good deal of winter time online, much of it related to farming. I bookmark a lot, and save (as in, download) pages that I think I should have around if the Net somehow went away. I seldom print, or take many notes on the computer, steno pads are perfect for all that, writing things out helps keep the volume manageable. And that’s about it, the modern, simple (but tech-entangled), tiny farming research station. Handy…! (Bonus game: What makes this not just any computer station, but a GARDEN station? Can you spot the soil thermometer? :)
Internet
Virtual local?
This morning, there was a phone company tech at work on the junction box at the top of the drive into the farm. I’m not sure what the guy and his logo-truck were up to exactly, but the picture made me think about tiny farming and the Web. Right now, Bell and an independent telecom company are in an extravagant, introductory-offer battle for subscribers to the newly available DSL broadband service. High speed Internet access has been in this area for years, in towns and even villages, but dial-up was the only easy, painfully slow connection for most farms (we’re on the edge of a village, so we’ve had cable modem all the while). Now, word-of-mouth is that people on farms are signing up for DSL—will more abundant web access mean more interest in having a web presence? This could be interesting because, out of 30+ vendors at the farmers’ market, I think this farm is still the only one with a web site. An odd situation, considering that online is really the only practical place for small producers to let people know what they’re up to. With the novelty of DSL, maybe more farms will finally get around to getting online, which is probably a good thing, because it takes more than a few people to make a local market thrive. Just as Tiny Farm Blog has rapidly become embedded in my farming life (BTW, TFB isn’t the farm site), maybe this technology, where you sit in front of a screen and TYPE, is what it takes these days to hook people up in the communities where they actually live… I suspect, in some ways, to at least some people, you’re not all that REAL if you’re not represented online… Even if you’re practically next door! A little weird, but whatever works!