Sorry I can’t replicate the accent grave needed to make the word déja look really French, but I do have the accént acuté, so there. (The letter a in déja needs the grave.)
Yesterday I downloaded eight pages of instructions to connect to a new transponder on one of the 15 or so satellites used by HughesNet, my satellite Internet provider. I have had to live with almost a whole week of dial-up speed, something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. (Well, depends on the enemy.) After seven tries punching in a bunch of arcane numerology, it worked. The satellite modem’s bright blue LEDs all lit up, and the upload and download speeds crept up a bit, but it was nothing to email home about. I figured they needed to work out a few wrinkles, so give them time. But now, a full day later, the signal strength has plunged from 68 out of 100 down to 15. Only two of the five lights are on. Deep sadness suffuses my spirit.
This blog entry, number 201, is being brought to you courtesy of SierraTel Internet, my backup dialup account. It costs about $20 per month to maintain, and I have kept it since 1995 for the email address, but have used it only a couple of times in the past five years for Internet connecting. You, my loyal readers, deserve this uninterrupted access to a rotting mind, so expense be hanged!
Living in the boonies has its benefits and its costs. If you want rapid unfettered access to the world through the Internet, live in or near a city. If you want access to gobs of wild animals, nocturnal insects that pierce you with their veiled probosces and raise welts the size of lima beans as you snooze in innocent rural innocence, and the constant threat that everything you’ve accumulated over your mega-decades of life on this planet can go poof in a wildfire, go boonies. My sister in southern California has DSL that easily exceeds the speed of light. And some wild birds. But no rattlesnakes. Somehow she’s found a way to live with that. She has my profound sympathy. And utter envy.
3 comments:
I admire your deep committment to us, your blogreadership. Thank you.
And I miss the boonies (Australian translation: Boonies = The Bush) myself. Interent in or around this current cty of ours isn't any faster than it was in the bush.
You probably have good Internet access in the bush because practically the entire population of Australia lives near the coastline. So the telephone companies simply have to ring the continent with one really long wire and hook everyone up to it. In the US, we’re scattered over a similar land mass, but the telephone companies have to cover it with a net of wire. Where I live the wire is too far from all the other wires.
Hmm. Not sure about that theory. They had some trouble hooking people up tp ADSL in The Bush due to the insufficent cable installed in the first place and the expense of digging it up and replacing it with new stuff. Linda can't get ADSL for example. Neither can most people in the Cape, unless they go satellite. The government recently offered free satellite instalation to people in The Bush so maybe more will get faster Interent soon.
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