Well folks, it was a rough few days. Not physically, of course, other than the exertion of moving all my belongings 100 miles, but the hardest part was the lack of Internet access. The image you see to the right here is of my dinky little MetroPCS phone – the one that barely gets me online so I can send updates to Twitter and check what’s going on into my GMail account.

Don’t laugh. It’s not nice.

Just shy of a week is the longest I’ve ever been offline in the last ten years (aside from when Hurricane Wilma blew through South Florida), and when it’s not a survival situation, it’s amazing how much that hurts. The lack of ambient awareness of what is going on in my world, the online world, is definitely palpable.

Still, I imagine it did me a bit of good being offline.  More time with the kids, the wife got to see more than the back of my head for extended periods of time. I had time to re-arrange my sock drawer. I was even driven to dust off a copy of SimCity 3000 and build a nice little seaside town.

I’m presently officing out of the Big in Japan coworking space at the famed Dallas Infomart, a smart open office that often plays host to the various Dallas <InsertWordHere>Camps. They’ve got a smoking fast Internet connection and a bunch of nice people from various web, mobile and tech startups and established companies in and out all day.

I’m here because AT&T still hasn’t connected my DSL line as promised, though I expect it to be on any day now (the latest promise is by 8 PM tonight – we’ll see).

Until then I’ll be coming down here fairly regularly to check in, and when the connection comes up at home, I’ll be back to my regular blogging frequency at /socnets and /robots.

Expect regular updates to resume here.