Thursday, September 20, 2007
Saturday, September 08, 2007
Alive and Well and living in exile
That’s what dialup feels like after a steady diet of ADSL for 4 years. I’ve always prided myself (yeah yeah, pride goeth before a fall etc) on being quite able to survive in the wild aka the country. Funny tasting water, septic fields and tanks (even … outhouses), limited channels on the TV, towns that roll up their sidewalks at 5 pm on a Saturday leaving only the local beer parlour open. Bugs, dirt roads, no air conditioning and a fireplace that you lit because there was a chill in the air, not because it was aesthetically pleasing; a fireplace that burns real wood from real trees (suck it up treehuggers, it’s a renewable resource and my family has been consuming and conserving for years before you came along) not some plastic monstrosity of an approximation of glowing logs that you plug in.
That was me, the country mouse. These were my norm and when I got my first (windows) computer and dial up came along all I could get was 33.6 while my city friends were getting ADSL and cable and raving about the lightning speed. I just grinned and patted my old P1 with its 512 mb of ram and was happy. I could play all the games (Spiritwars)I enjoyed. I talked to folks all over the world, often 4 or 5 of them at once with ICQ, I read my email including the MELFans list and I surfed the net. I didn’t care that it took 3 – 8 minutes for certain pages to come up. I had time. I was from the country. I was used to waiting for clouds to pass or the rain to stop, or start or for someone to come in from the fields to drive to town. Everything was worth waiting for and therefore waiting wasn’t a hardship.
Only now? I’m spoiled rotten. I’ve gasp turned into a city mouse. I like my quick as lightning webpages showing up, pictures and all as quickly as I can turn on the tabs on my firefox browser. I like it when my email downloads the 359 spam messages and the 30 real ones for me in 50 seconds or less. I like it …damnit… and I miss it
