One benefit, if benefit is the right word, of my father and mother in-law no longer an influence on my daily thought patterns, is that my mother is not one to fret over the workings of people we know only from television images and newspaper stories — the megawealthy, the overambitious politicians, the steroid-filled athletes, the exhibitionist actors, etc.

We can live taciturn lives without concern about those outside our day-to-day circle of influence.

Otherwise, I can serve on the committees that determine who gets wireless spectrum segments, whose technological development is the de facto standard, how to protect ourselves from monopolistic predators with no social benefits, and which laws protect people or corporations more.

At the end of the day, only I can truly tell myself if I am better off today than I was yesterday, or if I’ve put myself in a position to potentially be better off tomorrow.

For example, have you ever worked with a team to develop the de facto standard for a telecommunications method like ADSL?

For those who missed the whole dialup/ADSL/cable/satellite modem portion of history class, there once was a time when people were unable to get instant access to world events such as game scores, election results or regime changes except through mass media announcements.

Then, as technology progressed, we were able to communicate gossip about world events not just by landline voice lines but also through nonvoice methods like dialup modems, which some of us might only recognise through old films like “You’ve Got Mail” or ringtones that simulate a modem sync-up tone series.

Well, I guess it’s time for me to skip all that and join the new evolution in communication technology — a smartphone with builtin WiFi hotspot.

First, I’ll have to buy the smartphone, which is, for me, right now, a choice between the Samsung Galaxy SIII and the latest Nokia 9xx to be announced on 5th September (my wife leans toward the Apple iPhone 4/5 series).

Then, we’ll take the smartphones home, test their WiFi hotspot throughput, see if it’s faster than our ADSL line or a potential cable modem, and concede defeat that we can’t outcompete the advances of technology by continuing to stick with ADSL, a telecommunications method that a team I once worked with at Conexant (the descendant of Rockwell Semiconductor in the days of the Hayes modem and the AT command set) put into a play several products including a residential gateway.

After all, it doesn’t look like I’ll ever get the gigabit throughput that Chattanooga residents enjoy, let alone the speed that AT&T U-verse promises but hasn’t delivered to my household here in the so-called advanced metropolis of the Rocket City, a/k/a Huntsville, Alabama, USA, Western Hemisphere, Earth, Orion–Cygnus Arm, Milky Way galaxy, Local Group, Virgo Supercluster, Observable Universe.

In retrospective, all of this seems a bit slow, doesn’t it?

Well, we’ll leave that chapter in this story for another blog entry…