When my fiance and I got engaged, we knew that the wedding was going to be a giant undertaking. We both have very large families and very small pocketbooks. Fortunately, we were able to balance her desire for a big, elegant wedding and my desire to save a lot of money by going the DIY route in a lot of areas. Here are a few:

The planning

First, ditch the wedding planner. We use a combination of a beastly binder, Evernote, and The Knot for our planning purposes. Amanda keeps important documents in her binder, I keep important documents in Evernote, and The Knot provides a very useful checklist to keep us on schedule throughout the planning process. The binder also keeps the guest list handy, as well as any brochures or things that vendors provide us with. We carry a small notebook with us when out visiting vendors and the hall to grab any extra notes. Yes, doing it without a wedding planner is a little more work, but it can save you a bundle!

Decorations

This is a very common one that couples use to save a little scratch. Buy some tulle fabric on Amazon and some cheap Christmas lights (you can get them in any color!). Take some time to visit the hall and take some measurements. Plan it accordingly, and make sure you have help. Do it the night before the wedding with your bridesmaids and groomsmen. If enough people help, you will be able to knock it out rather quickly. The same goes for the centerpieces.

Plus, ditch the favors. Nobody cares about them. The little bells and goofy trinkets with your name on them? Nobody will remember that stuff. We found some great placeholders that we can put people’s names on that hold candy. People appreciate candy much more!

The Invitations

Still fairly common – print your own invitations. I discovered a great kit at Target that matched our color scheme and was very elegant and simple. We bought an extra ink cartridge and went to work. This is one of the more involved projects, but with a little teamwork, can save a ton. We bought a box of 50 invitations for around $30 apiece. That’s a huge savings!

Music

There’s a big debate online about the music – hire a DJ or do it yourself? We went to a wedding a little over a year ago that ran their own music. I’ve been to two of these weddings, and both times, nobody noticed a difference. The only difference, if done well, is there’s no obnoxious DJ. Here are a few tips to book your own music without sacrificing quality:

• Rent some good sound equipment from a local music store. Make sure you let them know you are going to run music from your laptop. Also, make sure you get a microphone for speeches.
• In that same vein, run the music from your laptop, not your iPod. This allows you a little more control over the lineups.
• Have a backup plan. Whether it’s another laptop or an iPod (in extreme situations), you never know when your hard drive is going to fail. We plan on having everything on my laptop, my Sansa Clip Plus, and on CDs.
• Put together playlists. You don’t want to just run music on random all night. Have specific playlists for certain times of the night (dinner, cake cutting, early part of the night, garter toss, etc.).
• Ask for request ahead of time. Part of the fun of wedding music is that people can input their favorite songs. In our invitations, we ask that everybody who has requests email them to me by a few weeks before the wedding so that we can put together the playlists.
• Hire a friend to DJ. You don’t need somebody to man it all night. With the playlists, it will run itself. But still, you’ll want somebody there to switch playlists, or move ahead a song if nobody’s dancing. And if you are the bride or the groom, you don’t want to have to pay attention to that. Have a friend that you trust keep an eye on it, and throw them a few bucks for the trouble.

Photo booth

This is a fun idea that I just had today. I’m in talks with my photographer to piece together a place for people to take fun pictures throughout the reception. Photo booths cost upwards of $750 for a couple hours in my area. We’re going to hang a sheet, set up a DSLR camera with a remote and tripod (thanks to a friend), rent some flash equipment, and let people take their own goofy pictures. We’ll leave a sheet for people to sign their email addresses and we can send them a link to the gallery once it’s loaded into Picasa. It’ll be great, and won’t cost a whole lot either! Photo booths are a fun trend in weddings right now.

Photography (to a point)

If you know a friend that takes great pictures, you may consider hiring them to do the photos. However, you will want to make sure this person will be on the ball (my future brother-in-law hired a friend to do his pictures, and it took almost a year to get their copies!). We are hiring a photographer, but we negotiated the price down by requesting that we just get a DVD with all the pictures on it after he’s done touching them up. Then we can order photo books for much cheaper through many different sites. It’ll save a few hundred bucks.

These are just a few ways to save money on a wedding while keeping it fun and elegant. If any of these blow up in our faces in 3 months, I’ll let you know. What’s your favorite wedding-related tip? Share it in the comments for all of us!

I remember the first scanner my family bought back in the early-to-mid-’90s. It was a little handheld thing that you slid across the picture yourself, and generally resulted in wavy, blurry pictures that looked terrible. Yeah, we didn’t use it much.

Flash to today: scanners are built into printers and the total package can cost around $50 or less, depending on where you get them. I have one, and I have seen multiple uses for it that have given me more than my money’s worth ($60 at the time of purchase). And before you tell me you have no use for one of these things, here’s a handful of reasons to get your hands on one:

1. Get rid of that filing cabinet/lockbox.

Okay, so you should still hang onto it for original copies of stuff that you need (i.e., birth certificates, etc.), but for bills that you need to hang on to, or random paperwork, it’s time to start scanning these things.

"What happens if my computer goes down and I lose everything?" Well, that’s why you pair it up with a good, free backup solution and you can let your house burn down to the ground, and you’ll still have copies of all your important paperwork. Plus, searching through your paperwork becomes infinitely easier. Ever sat in your file folder sifting through papers to try and find one little piece of information? Now you can have a bird’s-eye-view of all your paperwork at one glance, which save you a lot of time!

[Plus, if you keep a free Evernote account, you can make it even more searchable, and you can tag your documents, cutting that search time to mere seconds!]

2. Replace the fax machine/snail mail and start sending documents via email.

Yeah, we all do it, but what about when you need to sign something? You can do what I do and keep a Photoshop version of your signature, or you can print out the document, sign it, and scan it right back in as a PDF. Then you can move the PDF file to your backed-up folder where it belongs and attach it to an email. Done and done.

I’ve used this one to replace the long snail mail process for student loan documents and other important forms. Just ask the representative or whoever if there’s an email address you can send the form to. Most are just fine with that.

3. Preserve your memories.

A year ago, I took it upon myself to undertake a huge project: digitizing my parents’ family pictures. They, like many families, had a huge box full of pictures that were never put into albums. Any time we wanted to look at them, it was this giant deal where we lugged the box upstairs and had to empty it out on the kitchen table or the living room floor. It took hours and it was a mess.

After researching different photo services, I settled on (not surprisingly) Google Picasa. While Flickr is a very popular photo sharing site, I felt that Picasa was more geared towards the average user and not the photo enthusiast. At the time, Picasa also was the one that had face recognition, so I could tag people in a picture quickly and easily.

Using Picasa, I was able to categorize photos into albums based on decade, tag the people in them, and then tag them with categories ("wedding", "baptism", "school picture", etc.). Now, someone who knows the family and wants to look at our pictures can go to my Picasa page and view pictures based on what decade, what activity, or grouped by the person in the picture. That’s pretty sweet. I captioned each picture with whatever was written on the back of the photo. Oh, and this is all free.

Why would I want to do that? We preserve our memories on one of the most perishable of materials: paper. If there’s a fire, your memories are gone. If you keep them in the basement and the basement floods, your cherished photos are ruined. Heck, even just letting a few years pass can deteriorate the pictures – especially old Polaroids!

Scanning them in gives them a higher-quality preservation. Plus, you can back them up easily in a number of ways. The archives of photos that I put together for my parents are on my hard drive, backed up with my Syncplicity account, in my Google Picasa account, and on a DVD that I gave them. That’s 4 different backups. Bring on the floods.

4. Expense tracking.

Here’s a quick and easy one: do you save receipts for any reason? Scan them and drop them in a folder on your hard drive or in your Evernote account. Then you can throw away those annoying little pieces of paper.

So there you go, four great reasons to invest in a scanner. It beats down on clutter and gives you the chance to protect and preserve anything important that’s on a piece of paper. What do you use your scanner for? Share with us in the comments below!

Online printing site Digital Room has announced a new contest for readers of The Practical Nerd! Contestants are vying for a FREE 18”x24” custom poster print – create a photo-quality poster from an enlarged photograph or custom design for FREE! Click here for more information on poster printing from Digital Room.

For hosting this contest, I will also be getting a free custom poster as well. There are so many cool options for using this, I’m not sure yet what I will be doing. I may pick a nice picture that I’ve taken and get it blown up, or I might just search around for a cool design online for them to use. The possibilities are endless! This is a chance for you to add an original, personal touch to your bedroom, office, or dorm!

Here’s how to enter:

Comment on this post about how you plan to use your free custom poster. Do you want to use a photograph of you and your loved one? Do you have original artwork that you want to enlarge? Drop a comment on this post and get one entry into the contest!

Follow me on Twitter and say “Hi”. If you aren’t following me on Twitter, now’s the time to do it. Not only will you get an entry into the contest, but you will also get all the fun, cool, and useful links and content that I share on Twitter every day! Be sure to say something cool, and include the #posterprint hashtag for me. Following me on Twitter is also worth one entry.

Post about this giveaway on your blog! Already have your own blog? Tell your readers about our giveaway and link back to this post as well as DigitalRoom.com. Spread the word and you will receive 3 additional entries!

Tweet this giveaway to your followers! Just copy-and-paste this into a new tweet:

@TomMeitner and Digital Room are holding a #giveaway for a FREE custom poster! Check it out here: http://ow.ly/qyz3

We’ll take care of the rest, and you can get a new entry EVERY DAY for tweeting this! The more ways you enter, the better your odds are of winning!

This contest, sponsored by UPrinting, also includes FREE shipping. Contest is only open to U.S. residents. It ends on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009, at 11:59am. A winner will be chosen and announced here on that Tuesday afternoon. Those related to Tom Meitner are prohibited from entering the contest. If selected, you must reply to my email within 48 hours to claim your prize, or we will randomly select a new winner. Winners will be selected using Random.org.

Thanks everyone, and good luck – tell me what you plan to do with your poster print in the comments below (and get your entry!).

Everybody needs a little therapy sometimes. What’s that? Don’t want to pay a guy $500 an hour to lay on his couch while he doodles in a notebook? Well, you’re in luck, because there’s a better way to give yourself a little therapy without having to hire a psychiatrist. It’s called writing. Now, I know you probably hate writing. That stems from school, when teachers forced you to write x number of words/pages on a certain topic. That’s not what we’re talking about here. This is free, honest writing about whatever you want. Here are a few benefits to keeping a blog or journal for yourself:

• Full control over the medium. You don’t have to have it in a Word document, you don’t need to double-space everything, and it doesn’t need to be in 12-point Times New Roman font. You don’t have to use college-ruled paper on an 8.5”x11” sheet. You can type it out on a computer, you can use photographs, you can use postcards. Keep a tiny pocket notebook for quick thoughts, or lug around a big, leather-bound book with a bottle of ink and a feather. I really don’t care. Whatever you’re comfortable with and whatever works for you. Snap pictures, draw doodles, or record yourself talking. Use something that you will want to use.
• Empty your head = sleep better at night. I know so many people that toss and turn at night because they’re too busy thinking about what’s going on in their lives and things they have to get done. By keeping some type of journal of your thoughts and feelings, you allow your brain to relax. Think about it: if your brain knows something’s on paper and knows where that is (or on the computer, whatever), it will stop reminding itself all the time. Your brain knows when it doesn’t have to remember something, so give it a break and get it in writing somewhere.
• Watch your mindset evolve. One of the great things about keeping some type of journal is that you can look back on different situations and how you handled them. If it turned into a big mess, you can actively make changes to your approach if it happens again. It’s called “learning from your mistakes”.

You don’t have to be some deep, introspective person to do it. It’s important for everybody to take a step back and look at themselves a little bit each day. There are plenty of different methods for doing this:

A public blog

A blog is a great way to do it, as it is clean and accessible anywhere. Pair up a free WordPress account with a cool template and an easy-to-use writing program like Windows Live Writer. Then you just have to open a new blog and start typing away! Want to go even simpler? Posterous will let you blog even easier, by using email as its main form of writing. You send your email to post@posterous.com and it will format it and post it for you. Attach a photo or video and it will embed it right into the post for you. Downside: other people will be able to read it. So if you don’t care – you come from the days of LiveJournal – then go ahead. It’s a great, flexible way to do it.

Pen and paper

The traditional approach: this allows you to go anywhere with your thoughts. We all know how to write, and you can doodle in the margins, too. The big downside here is its vulnerability to the elements. Get caught in a rainstorm, and you might lose all your thoughts.

A Word Document

It’s something you probably already know how to do: open a document, label it whatever you want, and keep it in a designated folder. Type it and format it however you want, because it’s already something you’re familiar with. Downside: it might feel like you’re doing homework.

Yup, Evernote

There’s something intriguing about the idea of using Evernote as a journaling platform. First, it’s private, and accessible anywhere for you, including your mobile phone. Second, you can record your thoughts via photograph, links to other web sites, simple typing, or even voice notes. There are infinite ways to use it, and it’s also free. I’ve long touted the advantages of using Evernote, and this one just makes sense. It’s great for journaling on-the-go, too: the mobile app allows you to create new voice notes, text notes, and snap and store pictures to sync up with the rest of your notebook. Pretty crazy stuff!

There are a lot of creative ways to keep some type of journal. Give it a try for a couple weeks and see what happens. Do you have a favorite way to keep a journal, or are you considering it? Share with us in the comments!

The internet is awesome. There’s no denying it. What was once a breeding ground for dorks everywhere has turned into a social gathering place for millions of people of all ages. What happened? What caused those changes? What made the internet so gosh-darn inviting for so many people? Let’s start at the top.

The Early Internet

The internet of the mid-‘90s was something else. Dominated by *shudder* America Online, the Web browser was the afterthought, because AOL wanted to be its own gathering place for people with common interests. If you wanted to hop on the internet, you likely went through AOL at the time (50 hours for FREE!). Here’s what you wound up getting:

I hope you like text!

Computers and servers weren’t as far along back then. We’re talking the days of processors in the MEGABYTES (and hey, if you don’t know what that means, just ignore it and move on to the next sentence. I’m trying to say “They were SLOW”). So as a result, once you got past the header of a web page, the rest was usually text. And I’m talking about all-the-same-font kinda text. Sure, they tried to mix it up with underlining some words or maybe making some words bold, but in the end, it was just flat-out boring. You were there to read, and pretty much nothing else. Graphic designers hadn’t started on the concept of “Web design” just yet.

Forums and chat rooms? We got ‘em!

If you wanted to interact with other people on the internet, you did it through forums and chat rooms.

Forums were, initially, the only thing on the internet. And they were called “bulletin boards”. You and other people that generally resembled the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons would go on there and wax intellectually about the latest episode of The X-Files or something. It was a place to share opinions with a bunch of people who won’t listen to you, not unlike many forums of today (I guess not everything’s changed).

Chat rooms were a whole ‘nother beast. They were real-time, and generally useless. You went into a chat room to really just insult each other and marvel at who you were talking with, or who they were pretending to be, anyway. You’d go into a chat room, type “hi everyone a/s/l”, and then get bombarded with people saying stuff like “hi there! 19/f/Honolulu”. Riveting. Regardless of the fact that the person was probably 29/m/Detroit, there was zero point in any conversation in chat rooms. You didn’t go there to communicate with people you knew. You were there to, again, talk about the latest episode of The X-Files, or watch people lob insults at other people.

Really… really crappy web pages in general.

When I was 12 years old, I thought it would be awesome to have a web page. With sites like GeoCities, Angelfire, and Tripod offering free web pages, I thought it would be the coolest thing ever. So I put together a web page about pro wrestling (I was cool), with some of the pre-loaded backgrounds and stuff from GeoCities, and I had myself a web page! I cannot stress to you enough how useless this web page was and what little value it had to other people. I was 12. I had nothing to talk about.

And I wasn’t alone. That was the bulk of the internet at the time – a bunch of kids who knew nothing about stuff like “graphic design”, “HTML”, or “being interesting”.

The Turning Point

Thankfully for all of us, the internet changed for the better. But it wasn’t immediate:

Napster pulls music sharing out of IRC

The first CD I ever burned was through my oldest brother’s computer in late 1999, using music I found through his IRC client. Internet Relay Chat was the first way to get music, and it was the most tedious, mind-numbing process around. You went in to a music-sharing community, had to request a song, and wait for somebody to respond by sending you the file. It was clunky, slow, and generally awful. But I was able to put together a CD of my own mix. It was a huge moment!

Once Napster hit the scene in 1999, all bets were off. Napster was, at that time, easy to use and a lot quicker. You were still waiting 20 minutes to an hour per song, but the interface was something you could conceivably understand. You now had a logical reason to own a computer hooked up to the internet.

“I’m on the phone with you AND I’m on the internet! How cool is this?!?”

Ah, dial-up internet. When you wanted to hop online, you first had to sit through this (click "play" and then shudder a little). The biggest problem with sitting around on the internet? You were tying up the phone line! Unless you were rich and had a second phone line, you were paying per minute on dial-up, and you couldn’t make calls in the meantime.

Broadband changed all of that. First, it set up an entirely separate connection for your computer’s modem. Instead of paying per minute, you had a continuous connection to the internet at a flat rate. Then, it was about 87 billion times faster (approximately). Now you could sit on the phone with somebody and talk about the web page you’re looking at! Wicked!

Today: So much awesomeness for so many people.

The stage was set: file sharing, legal or not, was on the rise. Computers were getting faster. You had a continuous connection to the internet. It was time for things to boom. And boom it did. Here are the things that make the internet of today the most awesome thing since… um, the last awesome thing that happened:

Search engines help you find stuff quicker than anything else ever created.

It started with Yahoo!, and then Google perfected it. Heck, even Bing has it down pretty good. As more and more people were connecting to the internet, more information was being shared. For you to find that information, you need a search engine. While Google has become the Kleenex of search engines (how many people ask for a “tissue”, anyway?), several companies out there all make it dead simple to find whatever you need, and especially stuff you don’t need. Whenever somebody is looking for an answer to something, what do you tell them to do? “Google it.”

For example, I dropped my cell phone in the toilet yesterday. No, I wasn’t texting while doing my business. It literally flew out of my shorts pocket and square into the toilet – nothing but net. In the old days, I would worry that my phone was ruined forever, and that I needed to shell out another $200 to get another phone (phone insurance? peh.). But I hopped on Google and typed in “cell phone in toilet”, and got about 5-6 different strategies for drying out your phone, along with endless testimonials from people saying their phone works as good as new.

[Side note: if you ever drop your phone in the toilet, pull it out immediately, take out the battery, clean the thing, then throw it in the oven at 150 degrees for an hour or so. Dries the sucker right up and you’re back in business.]

Online shopping means freaking cheap prices.

So many people resisted it for so long out of fear for their credit card numbers, but as secure transactions rose, internet shopping became hotter. Amazon is the de facto place to get just about anything. Struggling to find whole, fresh rabbits for dinner at the supermarket? Amazon’s got it. Thinking about getting a little romantic on your next camping trip? Get your tips from this great book! She won’t get intimate because your back hair is thicker than Sasquatch fur? Amazon to the rescue! 

On top of all that great stuff, sites like eBay and Craigslist make it easy for you to get top-dollar for that antique peach de-fuzzer that you’ve had in your family for generations. Instead of trying to unload it at a garage sale, you can snap a picture of it, put it on eBay, and get $475.24 for it. On the flip side, your search for antique peach de-fuzzers is over. [Note: here's what a search for "peach de-fuzzer" turns up.]

BitTorrent: Making Napster Look Like Tape-Recording-Off-The-Radio Since 2001

Peer-to-peer file sharing has certainly evolved since the days of Napster. Your Limewire, your Ares, your BearShare, KaZaa, and WinMX are almost all but dead at this point. BitTorrent allows you to not just download from the person who posted the file, but from everybody else who’s downloading it or has downloaded it before. You know what that means? That means the latest album to hit the shelves can be downloaded inside of a minute. The latest episode of The Office (premiering tonight!) can be on your computer within 20 minutes of it hitting the Web, and under 2-3 minutes the next morning.

This is not a discussion of the legalities of BitTorrent use. The point is, downloading from the Web has completely turned the corner and become near-instant. Add to that the legal methods like iTunes or my Zune Pass subscription (so awesome and so few people use it!), and music is everywhere these days.

Streaming stuff lets you watch “FAIL” videos without clogging up your computer, and makes cable TV obsolete

We all know parents and grandparents who have no idea what they’re doing on the computer. You wonder why their computer is so slow, then you find a “Downloads” folder with over 350GB of videos that somebody emailed them ranging from a guy setting himself on fire while wearing a banana suit to that stupid dancing baby from Ally McBeal. You know why? Because in the old days, when you wanted to watch a video from the internet or listen to an audio clip, you had to download it. The first video I ever saw that was from the internet was the music video for “Buddy Holly” by Weezer.

Once YouTube rolled in, streaming video became easier than ever. In fact, you can even embed the stuff right into web pages, so now you can watch all those great videos I just mentioned quickly, without having to put anything on your hard drive. Observe:

[Warning: before you hit “play”, the first video is the banana one, then there are like, ten other examples, many of which are riddled with profanity, a naked butt, and hundreds of idiots whose parents were too busy to teach them not to do stupid stuff like this.]

And for cable TV becoming obsolete, I submit the following examples: Hulu, network television websites, and Surf The Channel. I rest my case.

Wikipedia answers your endless questions about Small Wonder

I discovered Wikipedia as a giant time-suck a couple years ago, and I love it. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that is generated and monitored (for the most part) by its users. While it can be edited to reflect false information, it does cite most of its sources and also allows you to check out random information about little-known stuff. Wikipedia is one of the most influential sites when discussing the power of collaborative thinking. It also is really useful when you didn’t read the novel you were supposed to write a paper on for your class on 19th-century British Literature.

And if you are wondering about the reference to Small Wonder in the heading there, click here to check out Wikipedia’s entry on this ‘80s television series featuring a little robot girl.

WordPress and RSS syndication make everybody an author, for better or for worse

Obviously The Practical Nerd would be an example of “for better”, but WordPress made it insanely easy for anybody to start a real web site, and customize it in a way that people would actually want to look at it and read it. There are literally millions of blogs on the internet right now, and many – not all, but many – of them offer some interesting and useful advice. In the old days, you had to go get a book based on newspaper book reviews for this stuff. Now, you can just Google it and find a blog that caters to your interests. Done and done.

In addition, the development of Real Simple Syndication, or RSS, feeds offer a method of subscribing to a web site’s content without having to check in on it every day or every couple of hours. It saves many people time and energy.

Mozilla Firefox lets you control how you want your browser to look and act

Remember Netscape Navigator? Ugh. Ugly, slow, and clunky. Internet Explorer? A little better, but slow and behind the times. Enter Mozilla Firefox. Firefox lets you add plug-ins and install different “skins” for your Web browser. There are an infinite number of ways you can alter Firefox and make it work the way you want it to. As I previously wrote, plug-ins and add-ons make Firefox the best browser around, in my opinion. They let you create the experience you want for your internet surfing (do people still “surf” the internet, anyway?).

Social media breaks the mold of how to share your life with your friends and family

When I took my last trip to Taiwan, I took about 300 pictures over the course of two weeks. In the old days, if I had done that, I would have to get home, develop all that film, and then get together with everyone I wanted to show the pictures to. Instead, in a hotel room in Los Angeles on the way home, I plugged my camera into my laptop, uploaded all of the pictures to Facebook, added captions, and sent everybody an email with a link to the album. People saw my pictures before I even got home.

Facebook and MySpace let you keep in endless touch with your friends. Flickr and Google Picasa allow you the opportunity to bring pictures to anyone you want. YouTube makes showing people that video of your kid doped up on laughing gas a cinch. Twitter lets you do any of those things to anyone who’s on Twitter, as easy as possible. All these things are now going real-time, too. Scheduling with your family or friends can be easily done with a shared Google Calendar, and you can get reminders of anything sent to you via text or email from Google Calendar or Remember The Milk, or just about anything that helps you organize and schedule your life.

Knowledge that you want to share with others is easier, too. There are bookmarklets and plug-ins that make sharing as easy as clicking a button. If I find an interesting political article that I want my friends to see, I can click a button that says “Share on Facebook” that will do just that. If I see a cool game or blog post about personal finance that I think is useful for the general public, I can click “Tweet This” and it will go to all my Twitter followers. Knowledge and information is being spread quicker than it ever has in the history of the world. Word-of-mouth can go across states, countries, and the entire globe in seconds, instead of years.

“Dude, I just met Hugh Jackman!” “No way, I don’t believe you.” “Okay, well check out the picture I just sent you!”

Mobile computing is taking instant communication to unheard-of levels. And if that Bill Curtis guy from those “get the internet anywhere” commercials are any indication, you can send and receive anything at anytime, anywhere. You can snap a picture on your phone and send it to your Facebook account, or email it to your buddy, or send it directly to someone via MMS. Everybody is with everybody, all the time.

Mobile computing also has lots of business implications as well. Entrepreneurship continues to rise as people can take their laptops anywhere and log onto their Google Apps to write up a document or edit a spreadsheet. The big, envious symbol of a successful blogger is somebody with a laptop on the beach, sipping a drink with an umbrella in it. While that’s not every blogger (and certainly not me!), it can be done. Computers have gone from the size of warehouses to the something that fits in your pocket. All the coolest things you can do on the internet can be done on your phone.

The internet isn’t just a meeting place anymore. It’s a method of delivering an endless stream of content, knowledge, and anecdotes of your life to the people you care about. It’s no longer necessary to get emails with “Fwd: fwd: fwd: FWD: Fwd:” at the beginning of them. It’s no longer necessary to sit and wait for downloads. The internet has made computing easy and fun for anyone. It has a purpose now. That’s why it’s so awesome.

What makes the internet awesome for you? Share with us in the comments!

Want to know what it looks like when people have a good camera and a lot of free time? Check out this handful of pictures of people dressing up their fingers in costumes. Then be glad you have things to do.