Today a friend of mine in the Starbuck's I frequent, told me that her cousin has "purapura". Naturally, I could hardly wait to get to a computer to look it up.

As I continued driving, I started thinking that this addiction to information satisfaction started very young with me, long, long before computers. I can remember as a very young child being shown the dictionary and loving the experience of looking up new words.

It was a relief when, in first grade, I finally learned the order of the letters of the alphabet, and an insult when, in third grade, the teacher gave an introductory lesson on dictionaries and how to use them. Huh.

My mother noticed how I loved to read the dictionary, so she bought me an encyclopedia. I started with the letter A and started reading my way through the volumes. Even played hookey so I could read.

I read everything: labels on cans, street signs, information inserts in medicines, everything.

Nowadays I Google. To find a word, all I have to do is highlight it in the text and then click Search, or type "define xxxxx" in the Google search box, hit Enter. More definitions than you can shake a stick at (if you're inclined to shake sticks).

So of course, the first thing I did this morning after booting the computer was Google "purpura" (Google has a great soundex and even if you only come close, it will usually find the word).

Sometimes I think if I lost my computer connection, I would miss the information access the most.