My HP PC couldn't get online this morning and my problem was downstairs in the den I thought. I reset the Belkin router and the cable modem and made sure the Ethernet cables were OK. Still no good and the bride's PC came up fine in the den (hard-cabled into the router).

And then I thought that my Cat 5 cable up the side of the house had finally died after almost 20 years of cold winters and hot summers. I had the problem troubleshot to my comm adapter card in the PC itself or to the cable draped down the side of my home that's been there a long time.

I moped over to WalMart in the 2011 Chrysler 200 4-door sedan and purchased a Belkin WiFi adaptor that works via a USB port and knew that if I could get the software set up correctly that it would "talk" to the router downstairs in the den.

It worked just fine. The adaptor weighs maybe an ounce and a half.

Sometime in the late '80s or maybe around 1990 Merrill Lynch was tossing the ancient IBM 386 PCs. The teen bride brought one home and we were amazed about what it could do on dial-up. A tiny postage-stamp-sized square could do limited loop video that lasted maybe 5 seconds before repeating. The IBM 386 weighed maybe thirty pounds or more but it had two floppies and a monster screen of maybe 12 inches that laid out a lot of colors.

I still have not ever owned a cell phone or have walked into traffic with a small glowing screen in front of my face but I'm still clawing my way into the 21st century while keeping up with what was good in the 20th.