View 681 Thursday June 30, 2011
I do these silly things so you don’t have to. This is one of them. For reasons I’ll get to when I have high speed connectivity, I am at the moment working with dialup, using the built-in modem in my ThinkPad and my Earthlink dialup account over the local telephone. I have had this EarthLink account since Sky Dayton came over to Chaos Manor one evening and set up the account for me. Needless to say this was before anyone had high speed Internet connectivity. The silly thing I am about to do is publish this by dialup.
After which I am going to go out and buy the wherewithal to do direct high speed connectivity. Meanwhile, I get all my mail, but there are some problems about replying to it: my new ISP doesn’t like to be connected through dialup. That’s a security measure, and understandable. It’s not a real problem.
I won’t try to publish mail or any long essays until I get high speed. I should have that by this afternoon, along with a longer account of this adventure. Meanwhile, I’m collecting the mail, and I have read much of it. As usual when we travel, a reliable friend moves into Chaos Manor to keep the place safe and Sable happy. We’ll be back home shortly. Meanwhile, here’s one more silly thing I have done so you don’t have to.
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It worked. Indeed it worked flawlessly and surprisingly quickly. Hurrah.
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Except that because we usually get down here on a Thursday I thought today was Friday, But I have fixed that, and while the first two parts of this were published by dialup, I am now using a new AT&T phone card. Wow does it use bandwidth. It’s fast, but expensive; but then that’s about what you’d expect. Full report another time, but I am now connected by high speed through AT&T directly.
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Communications established. I have full communications and I can now do a View essay and try to catch up on some of the mail. Thanks for all the patience. For reasons buried in my subconscious whenever I start to say thinks I want to write thanks for all the fish. But I didn’t get any fish. At least I know it’s my subconscious, unlike Dick Geiss’ Alter Ego who may or may not have been a separate personality (and yes, I know him off line, and Alter has never appeared in face to face interactions). But that’s all another and entirely irrelevant story. I seem to be rambling more than usually today, but that is probably because it is time to get to work. The story of the Road Warrior and re-establishing connectivity while in the middle of changing to a new web host, a new web log format, and making various other changes ought to work for a new column. I haven’t done a column in a while. I have an arrangement with BYTE – the new BYTE – in which we will be able to have my Chaos Manor Reviews page, but my columns will also appear in the new BYTE. The New BYTE will also get some of the Chaos Manor Mail. I need to revive that, too, since the Mail here tends to all subjects, while mail at Chaos Manor Reviews is pretty well technical and computer related only.
I haven’t followed as many computer trends in the past few weeks as I used to, but it turns out that viewed from a distance many of them didn’t need following. I don’t do topical news anyway. There are places with the staff to do that. In the Old BYTE days I sometimes looked as if I were right on top of trends and changes, but that was in part due to the rather marvelous editorial staff in Peterborough, and in part because in those days computer developments were often really important: a new 56K modem that worked when the only reliable communications were at 28K was a life changing event, as were marvels like Zip drives. Now, for most purposes, what we have is already Good Enough, and while being out at the bleeding edge can be interesting, it’s just not the same: there’s very little the best equipped Power User can do that the Good Enough equipped Power User isn’t already doing. It’s different for games, of course, but that’s another story, and I don’t much do high end twitch games for the same reason that I no longer ride motorcycles or go for cruises through Death Valley.
And now it really is time to get back to work.
