Maybe No Cable

The local cable outlet, from whence we get our internet service, will be doing work to "upgrade" the system so I fully expect the remainder of the day to be blacked out. This is one of the reasons I'm up at at 'em earlier than usual, to clear the deck before taking off to parts unknown in order to fire copper-coated lead projectiles into dastardly targets that decidedly need shooting.

Wonder of wonders...

Everything was re-set and the French say it best...Vy-Oh-La. Not without a stutter step but of course, as at first accessing the net returned the dreaded PAGE NOT FOUND, but it only took a dozen or so attempts before whisking to Algore's baby was a done deal.

Genuine technology spoils me. Gone are the days of starting then restarting a car, bloody things fire up like magic and keep running until you turn the key to OFF. Microwave turns on first shot or it's off to buy a new one. Toaster doesn't pop then frig it. Deep-6 the sucker and go to Wal-Mart. Purchased my first personal computer in 1990. It lasted 6 days before an in-house warranty attempt showed the mother board to be shot and the 2 week wait for a new one wasn't a big deal because there really wasn't an internet and nobody had email. AOL or Prodigy were about the only games in town and I turned back to ESPN for my sport scores instead of searching online. That was a an HP. Next up was an IBM and it worked pretty good but AOL was always down so the addiction to instant access hadn't taken hold. By '96 I had 4 pc's of varying degrees of workability cranking along, but AOL still was a hit or miss affair. That's when I moved to Australia and lo and behold their connections were always operable. But dial-up was dial-up, after all, and as more and more graphic-laden web sites came online it was go for a Pentium 4 with, gulp half a gig of RAM or sit and watch water boil or a page load, same difference.

I've tried HP, Dell, IBM, brands I've long since disremembered, had pc's made to spec, but since they all used Windoze and AOL to get anything done there wasn't a guarantee of GETTING anything done. We finally switched to our present cable connection a year or so back, use a P-4 with a gig of RAM, only access AOL for email (which works maybe 50% of the time since they "upgraded" the service couple weeks back), switched from Internet Exploder to Firefox, and mostdays the thing runs halfway decent. Cox Cable flickers with the first raindrop and this is not a good thing when one lives in the tropics but we grin and bear. After 17 years of personal computing one might imagine something of a mexican standoff would have occurred, but no. They suck. I despise the very thought of their existence. Getting a good one is the luck of the draw. The new dual processor Dells sure look good, but deep down inside I know that they just suck dually. If it wasn't for internet porn I'd chuck it all, put an antennae on the roof and make believe it was 1950 all over again. (STRIKE THE INTERNET PORN THEN SEE ME IN MY OFFICE: EDITOR)