Get back to where you once belonged!

Given my recent, two week long encounter with the hell that is “dialup” internet access, I have gained new insight into the internet at large. First of all, I remember back in 1998 when I got my first uber-computer, and how amazing it was to everyone online that I could connect at 56.6k. It was amazingly fast for the time.

Why, then, is it so slow now? Perspective, my friends, perspective. For two years now I’ve been used to Adelphia cable internet, which is $20 wine compared to dialup’s Jug O’ Plenty. Neither of them is fine wine, of course (please God, let Verizon bless me with fiber to the premise), but obviously broadband is a much sweeter nectur. This punishment at home taught me a few things that living more-or-less without the internet for over a month in Italy failed to.

1) Anything is better than nothing. I am horrified to think about what might have happened if my old free dialup account had been discovered and destroyed. Checking Ars Technica every day, and being able to change my address online for the dozens of things I forgot about before leaving behind the old house, was nothing short of a godsend. For the first two days at the new house, we didn’t even have a phone line, so it was a breath of fresh air once even dialup was possible.

2) Everyone should do this. Why? Because once you get broadband back, it’s like giving eyesight to the blind. Even though my new DSL is technically slower (in bandwidth; the latency is so much lower that I’m actually wondering if I shouldn’t revise my opinion of DSL vs. Cable internet) than my old cable, my experience with resurgent dialup cleansed me enough that I feel like kissing FitzSheba every time she loads a web page instantly, or downloads Firefox 0.9.3 in fifteen seconds rather than minutes.

3) It’s different when you travel. Roman ruins have an interesting effect of distracting you from petty things like Jux or email…well, not email. Without email in Italy, I probably would have died as well. In fact, come to think of it, it was easier to check my mail in Italy than using dialup.

Finally, I would like to say that the last hurdle to feature production has been removed, and thus they should begin again shortly.

I would also like to extend my thanks to the lovely MacSheba, who was a ray of light in the darkness of the dialup night. Sheba, and her cyborg upgrade FitzSheba, were built for broadband only. There’s no less than two NICs in FitzSheba (one a PCI Netgear that I actually use, the other is onboard. Sheba’s motherboard didn’t have onboard LAN, and the Netgear NIC is faster than the ASUS Nforce2 board’s built-in…but just barely.), but no modem. They were never designed to dial up to anything. MacSheba, luckily, had a built-in internal 56k modem that I could use in my time of need.