Update early, update often.
It might bite you sometimes but it is better to be on the bleeding edge than the fossilization edge.
It was sometime in late 2003 (December-ish) I last used a dial-up modem.
I initially ditched dial-up for ADSL in early 2001 (512k/384k), but in fall 2003 a faster ADSL option (8M/1M) was offered in my area and I signed up for it. And I also cancelled the old service at the same time. (During this time there wasn't a smooth way to switch DSL providers in Sweden. It was shortly thereafter that they worked out a consumer-friendly way of doing it). But there were significant delays in getting the new DSL service as it was pretty popular.
So I had to go back to dial-up for almost three months. I found a provider that offered a semi-flatrate (X minutes for Y money, thereafter Z money per minute [I don't remember the exact rates]). It got kind of expensive for my student budget. A $100-150+ USD equivalent extra cost per month was not insignificant. But in the end I got my faster ADSL connection and I was happy.
Then (1995): An awful Compaq Presario CDS522. 4 MB RAM. 66 MHz Intel 486SX2 (that's right... no floating point unit). 270 MB HDD. 14" built-in monitor of questionable quality... I was so happy I finally got a computer. But the happiness quickly faded away as I began to realize how bad the computer was. Upgraded the memory over a year later with 16 MB to a whopping total of 20 MB but the system still sucked overall. I had to cope with it for two years until I managed to replace it with a newer computer.
Now: 12 GB RAM. Intel Core i7 990X overclocked to 4.6 GHz. 480 GB SSD + 2 TB HDD. Starting to be a couple years old now but is still OK performance-wise.
In 1997. I bought a used GSM phone, think it was an Alcatel HC 400, and a pre-paid SIM for it. It was OK but there were some issues with it, such as the battery not having a perfect fit so the phone would occasionally switch off when having it in the pocket. I fairly quickly went on to other phones.
The most annoying phone I've had was a Philips Diga, circa 1998. There were many usability issues including that it was way too easy to accidentally call the emergency number.
The phone longest in use I've had was an Ericsson T65. I bought it in 2002 and used it until around 2008. Durable and good-enough feature set.
My morning commute from the suburbs to downtown Stockholm is 37 minutes when everything goes by the timetable. Usually it becomes about 40-45 minutes due to delays on the metro.
Broken down into components:
I neither love nor hate Firefox these days. For me it just has become somewhat irrelevant in the past years. Sure Firefox/Mozilla was instrumental in ending the dominance of Internet Explorer, but somewhere along the path it just ceased in general to have momentum of being awesome.
For me it was somewhere around Firefox 3.5-3.6 I stopped using Firefox as my main browser. I got fed of the entire browser freezing with multiple tabs open just because one of the tabs had content that started acting up, usually some heavy Javascript or Flash. So I tried out Chrome and really liked it, even though at the time there wasn't any ad blocking extension available for it.
My daily commute to work is by metro train (or subway or underground or what you want to call it).
The door-to-door time from my apartment in the southern suburbs of Stockholm to the workplace in central Stockholm is about 37 minutes, of which 25 minutes is on the metro train and the rest walking.
Motorcycle could possibly be the fastest reasonable choice as they are not as prone of getting stuck in rush hour traffic. Traveling by car would just be silly due to the traffic situation and availability of faster options.
A bicycle would also be a fairly reasonable choice for me as it would take about 45-50 minutes. Walking the whole distance is a bit over two hours.
Measured speed: about 115 Mbit/s down, 11 Mbit/s up.
Cable; 100 Mbit/s down, 10 Mbit/s up. 399 SEK (~ $58 USD; €45 EUR) per month.
At home in the suburbs of Stockholm, Sweden
My latest electricity bill (Jun-Aug) had a cost of
And here I thought that from what I've heard so far that Earth had possibly some dust or at most some gravel at its L4 and L5 points. This discovery of a sizable asteroid there makes the Earth's L4/L5 points much more interesting. Hopefully there is even more to be found!
We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge. -- John Naisbitt, Megatrends