How far can you go beeing independent from local surroundings?

With my new iPod mini I have made a big step into this direction. Always, always, always listening to music, to new music and to good music is a must have for people like me who own a label. Most music I hear come directly from the net or via mail. I am constantly downloading music, listen to it and deleting it again. Downloading, consuming, deleting. It is all in the net for free, so I can always download it again if I want to. The same with software. I try to go 100% free software. There is the same mode: download latest version, install it, delete installfiles. I really have no need for local software- or musicstores anymore (since the stores in Kaiserslautern are really bad equipped.)

I get recommodations by audioscrobbler and del.icio.us. Theese systems work pretty fine. The recommodations are really good and mostly are high quality content. And while heading for netmusic and free software I don’t have to swap any dime. Costs for living decreases and it makes me really independent from local surroundings. And this is a very big contrast to the annoying, boring and low quaility life out there in “reality”. Just compare products from any store to products delivered by del.icio.us.

When outside, I have the music, I have some sketchbook, my mobile computer and a digital cam by my side. What I still have to enhance is steady connection to the net - everywhere, i.e. for live-blogging. Also fast and quick live-coding could be enhanced. (You would not pull out your laptop on a streetcorner to quickly sketch some lines of code.) But i think the processing for mobiles project has a pretty good the chance to solve this problem.

So my cultural life is somehow depending on a flatrate and the USB-port.