Tonight I’m sitting on the porch enjoying the warm summer breeze while working online for the first time–thanks to the wireless network I finally set up last night. I just never bothered to set one up, since our wired network has served us just fine, but now that my third floor room has reached oven-like temperatures, I decided it was time to give myself a bit more mobility to work in other (cooler) parts of the house. For only $40 bucks and about an hour of my time, it will definately be worth it.

What strikes me about this relatively modesty technological advance is not how easy it was but how long I was willing to put up with sitting in one place in my room, even after I had grown used to working in many other places with wireless networks. I’ve been so thoroughly conditioned to work around what’s convenient for computers that I often forget to demand more user-centered experience from the tools I use.