| Thursday,
December 13, 2001 Life at the bottom of a 28.8 well is
horrible, particularly after that brief experience with Ricochet. The
DirectPC satellite is no substitute. Better than nothing, for some things,
but it's pretty ghastly. Sigh.
The simplest things take forever as people make their web sites more
complicated and link to more and more advertisements. Microsoft game zone,
by making itself part of the .NET Passport fiasco, has put itself beyond
the reach of anyone without high speed connections. Perhaps they don't
WANT us last class netizens..
Paypals transactions can be a real pain if you have to do several,
because their attention to security is pretty good but that overloads
their servers sometimes, other time it just takes forever for the
information to get here. The World Wide Wait continues...
One supposes it will be better, eventually. And of course once everyone
has fast bandwidth all the servers will be overloaded as people try out
things that for now they don't want to do because of the long delays. How
long will it take to get better? Of course we should count our blessings:
we have more than even the most optimistic among us, myself included,
would have predicted ten years ago. Eventually we got it going. See
Below.
Long letter and longer
essay/reply by me on air warfare over in mail.
And those interested in XP should read:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23347.html
Eric says Microsoft just went to the .NET Passport business for their
ZONE games, and things are really fouled up, but it ought to be temporary Fine. But with the satellite or without, I cannot
manage to SIGN IN TO THE .NET so I cannot sign up for a zone passport
so I cannot play Asheron's Call. I presume that applies to everyone else
trying to get into the game. Those who previously were set up apparently
can mange. The rest of us can wait for Microsoft to get its act together.
They had something working, so they decided to fix it. Brilliant of
them. One day they will get it fixed, but my confidence in .NET has
been reset to VERY LOW. If they can't manage games, why would I
believe they can make things easy for software developers? Can't
find the login servers. Well, well, well.
Much later. First, I went upstairs to work. We got several calls
from Microsoft offering to help get me into the game, and eventually when
I came down I did. As is always the case with the people I deal with at
Microsoft, everyone was helpful. I had before it was over four people
including a product manager and a testing supervisor on the phone with me.
You probably will not get this level of technical support, although they
tell me they have some very good tech support people.
We went through my getting on to Asheron's Call. It's fairly arcane
just now, and if I had not had the satellite system (or some other means
of high speed access) it would have taken all day: there were at least two
multi-megabyte downloads required. During this configuration there was at
least one advertisement inappropriate for teenagers, and one of the people
on the phone who has a teenage daughter who plays Asheron's Call was a bit
shocked: they say they will talk to the advertising people and pull that
ad, and review the others.
Eventually it was configured and I was ready to log on: this went
exactly as does Everquest: at that point the satellite system won't work,
and I had to switch to 28.8 dialup -- at which point I had another
discovery. Unlike Everquest, where the updates are all done at the
"master server" level and thus can be brought in by satellite,
Asheron's Call has updates that have to be downloaded at the individual
server level (in my case Thistledown). I switched to 28.8 and I was able
to log on all right, and the system is STILL UPDATING half an hour later.
I expect eventually it will finish since it shows progress (25% in 40
minutes). I also presume that once that enormous lump has been eaten
I won't need to do that again. Unlike Everquest which shows each file as
it downloads and thus gives you some notion of progress, this just gives a
"progress report" overall. It's going to be a while, and
that is where I am just now.
Note: when I say 28.8 what I mean is that the modem is 56K but the FCC
restricts it to 53, and the best effective I have seen is about 44;
usually I get about 34K effective, sometimes I get less than 28.8. Local
wiring isn't all that good I guess.
Later Still: I have got on. So far no one will talk to me, but that may
be a function of my not knowing how. Also, the sound isn't working at all,
which is odd; it's ok before I go into the game. But I can get there,
finally, so it's possible to do some comparisons now.
Thanks to the Microsoft troops....
(And the sound eventually worked but took some downloading of drivers
and reinstallations. But we got there. I now have Asheron's Call working
properly. So far not many will talk to me, and I seem to have come in at a
very lonely place where few come. I presume that will change.)
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