All that you have is your soul (Tracy Chapman).

Monday 23 January 2006

Hello Broadband!

I know, I know. It’s been four whole days since my last posting. Do you forgive me for making you wait so long?

I have a good reason but of course you may not judge it to be valid enough to warrant missing four days of what could have been phenomenal blogging, but anyway, let me get to the point.

I’ve migrated to broadband (ADSL). From enduring a pretty pathetic connection speed of 56k (I’m almost embarrassed to declare this), I am now getting a whopping 2meg..

Being an IT teacher, I am very aware that I’m probably not getting the speed I’m paying for, however, it’s a damn sight faster than “wot I had” but three days ago.
I could bore you with the typical it didn’t connect first time story (it didn’t), but I’ll spare you the agony of reading yet more of my moans.

I spent the first few hours glued to the VDU, downloading every addition I could to Google Earth. Genius that I am, I didn’t realise that you have to untick the places you’re not visiting, otherwise, you find yourself running a program that’s hogging 100mb of memory AND trying to keep on streaming to 100%.

Since I don’t have a supadupa sized RAM, it virtually ground the machine to a halt. In fact, at one point, I wondered if I wasn’t being cheated about the download speed. Never mind, it’s still an amazing program.

The novelty hasn’t worn off yet although the biggest joke is that Dana, understated as she usually is when it comes to technology “hasn’t really noticed the difference”. Maybe she’s got the right attitude.  In a week, I’ll hardly remember that I had anything else, but now, as my pc zooms along cyberspace at the speed of the Millennium Falcon, I’ll enjoy the ride (and I’ll put money on the fact that one of you will write in to tell me that my connection is slow when compared to his/her 24mb monster).

I always knew I’d get broadband, I just hadn’t reckoned that my first taste would be at this speed. Mmmm!