By Linda Davis

My laptop arrived with me this week at Inman Real Estate Connect in New York City. I had planned to do some blogging from NYC.  Unfortunately, despite internet access throughout the hotel including free wireless in the lobby, I was unable to connect.  I’m usually not very far from my laptop.  I have this routine of reading the news and checking my overnight email with breakfast.  I check the news again during my lunch break. Except when I’m on appointments, most of my real estate day consists of online activities like email, lead generation, feedback from showings, MLS updates, statistical reports, and lots of other things technical.  Evenings are my time to be creative; that’s when I work on my websites and blog.  In between, I visit with my network of friends on social networks like flickr and twitter. 

When I arrived home, I was still unable to connect and it turns out that Comcast was the culprit all along. For those in Gales Ferry, you’ll know what I’m talking about.  Comcast has been having intermittent outages since the end of December.  One of those outages did something bad to my computer and as a result, I was unable to connect in NYC.  It’s all fixed now but the Comcast connection is still iffy. 

Being without internet access for almost 4 days was challenging. The whole situation made me realize how dependent I am on technology and being online.  I was able to keep up with email for the most part with my Blackberry but still had 521 emails to review once I got home.  If you are waiting for an email from me, I expect to catch up real soon.