Internet Follies

The internet has become such a large part of our lives that going without is no longer a practical option.  It now is a major way of staying connected with family and friends, finding information quickly and a source of entertainment.  I had wonderful high speed DSL two houses ago.  Our last house while have a lovely location was rural so at that time the only internet service available was dial-up.  When we moved here which is also rural we were able to get satellite internet service that according to them was a step up from dial-up.  It has been absolutely nothing but a pain in the kester!  I'm not kidding if a mosquito is so much as even remotely being near the beam the signal goes out.  Then there is the wonderful FAP graciously approved of by the CRTC.  It means that at some magical bandwidth trigger of which the satellite service does not have to reveal they will throttle down the service to lower than dial-up speeds.  Essentially what happens is you pay 100% for 40% at best of the advertised satellite internet speeds.  Now would you go into a restaurant, order a burger and pay full price if they brought you out less than half of the burger?  Not very likely but the CRTC in their ultimate wisdom on how to screw the consumer thinks so.  And Dalton McGuinty doesn't think spending over $50 for crappy satellite service is not enough so he so graciously added HST to our service increasing the price to just a little over $60. 

Our recent satellite internet outage got me thinking.  The CRTC endorses ripping off the conusmer so even though we are paying a bit over $60 for the service we really are getting $24 worth of bandwidth per month and McGuinty is pocketing about $7 thanks to his handy tax grab aka HST.  My husband put me on his office internet account for $20 per month.  Right of the bat if I stay on dial-up I will save over $40 per month and dear old Dalton will get a lot less of my money.  But it gets better than that!  The CRTC also has screwed up the National Do Not Call Registry meaning if you register your phone number to prevent telemarketing calls the reverse actually happens.  Telemarketing calls increase!  Apparently the CRTC thinks this is acceptable but it's not like they are the brightest lightbulb in the pack.  Oh and I should mention we pay for our phone service so each telemarketing call actually costs us and somewhere along the line they think they have the right to call us?  Wrong!  The only ones who have the right to call us are our family and friends.  On the brightside if I go back to dial-up rather than get a second phone line I will use our main line that will give all the lovely telemarketers a busy tone saving me the hassle of having to add them to my call block list.  All around dial-up internet is looking rather pleasing!

Garden Gnome
©2006-2010

Life Unconnected

Yesterday we experienced very high winds.  As a result our crappy satellite internet service got even crappier with the winds moving the dish out of alignment.  The connection was lost about 3 pm yesterday so I've been without internet!  Let me tell you life unconnected is weird.  The repair is expected to take anywhere from one day to a week depending when dumb and dumber can get out here.  My husband has real high speed at the office so added dial-up access for me so I am now on dial-up for the time being.  However, I'm thinking going back to dial-up until we move might just be the way to go. In order to maximize the savings it would mean learning to do a bit more offline.  Apparently Blogger didn't like my dial-up service but that must have been a Blogger glitch or a connection error as reconnecting got the picture to upload.  Anyway, life unconnected is an experience I really don't care fore.


Garden Gnome
©2006-2010

My How Times Have Changed

Amstrad PC Computer System Discs

September 13, 2010

My goodness when I look back on our computer experience it is astounding just how far we've come in a short period of time.  When I was in secondary school we were introduced to computer punch cards using Fortran.  I proudly brought my spent cards home so they could be turned into a Christmas wreath for the front door.  Years ago we bought an Atari 64 that one of our kids was just mesmerized by.  Said kid would sit for hours and I do mean hours punching in line after line of code for the simple reward of seeing a small white ball bounce across the screen.  When I went back to university I was still working on an old electric typewriter which was a step up from my even older manual typewriter.  Back in secondary school I learned touch typing and a Pitman shorthand both of which I still use today.  Think of the shorthand as an earlier version of today's internet lingo like LOL.  The electric typewriter was upgraded to a self correcting electric typewriter the same year.  Then I discovered computers!  I learned a whole new language called Linex and learned how to search using Gopher and get email through Pine.  If that wasn't bad enough I was introduced to Mac.  All of a sudden a whole new world opened up.

My husband declared that the self correcting typewriter was not good enough for academics so he brought home a brand new Amstrad PC that ran on MS Dos®.  It even had Gem Paint™ and Wordperfect.  I think we had that computer for a couple of years before we upgraded to Windows 3.1.  Fast forward to now and having gone through a lot of operating systems I am still comfortable working in Linux, Windows, dropping to Dos and Mac.  For daily computing I prefer Mac while my husband uses Windows.  My computer is dual OS both Mac and Windows XP.

Just look at the size of those discs though and they were only write protected with a small piece of foil tape!  Over the years the discs got smaller and smaller but always increasing in storage space.  Next on the scene for us were the 3¼ floppies with the hard case then came CDs and now memory sticks that likely could hold more memory than our old Amstrad could!

It's rather fun reminiscing about computing and how much it has changed in a very short period of time.  It's also amazing to think of how much we've learned over the years about computing and everything that goes along with it.  I wonder what the next 20 or so years of computing will bring?

Garden Gnome
©2006-2010

If I Could Turn Back Time

I read with great dismay that one of my favourite bloggers, Maitri is stepping away from most of her online life.  She has said she will continue writing one blog but she has let the other blogs, Facebook and Twitter go in favour of living more in the real life.  I'm saddened by this because Maitri's blogs are one of the first I visited on a regular basis back when I started blogging a little over 4 years ago.  The thing is I really do understand where Maitri is coming from.  I know it has been a rough year for her especially with the loss of one of her beloved pugs. 

There are days that I honestly think walking away from my online life would just make things so much simpler.  There would be no pressure to try an get posts out on schedule and no dealing with any online nonsense.  In many ways I have cut back on my online activities especially when it comes to forums and groups but I'm considerably more active on social networks.  At the same time blogging fills a need for me so I have no intentions of cutting back on that any time soon. 

If I could turn back time...I really think I would be right here where I am right now.  I'm content and happy so that's all that matters.  It's funny thinking back how our first computer, an Amstrad 88 has taken me to here.  Well actually our very first computer was an Atari but one of our kids used it all the time, spending hours typing in code just to get a little ball bounce across the screen.  The Amstrad was different.  Our first internet set up was Internet in the Box and I learned Gopher, Pine and Linux.  It was unbelievable that I could easily talk to others half way around the would.  Those really were good days for going online.  They weren't as pretty but there were no worries about trojans, viruses and spam was almost unheard of.  There were great ICQ and bulletin boards.  I got to know the newsgroups.  It when I learned by trial and error how to create a homepage using a funny language called HTML.  My favourite operating system was Windows 3.1 and back then I was a die hard PC (Windows) user.  I got into internet security and privacy so learned a lot about that something that still helps today. One of our kids got me into Mac for home use although I was quite familiar with Apple through academia.  I made the move to Mac at home about 7 years ago and have never looked back although my current iMac is dual core so partitioned to use both Windows and Mac opperating systems. 

In terms of online activities at some times it would be nice to turn back time to a quieter, less intrusive time of being onlin; a time when trolls were dealt with accordingly with a few well placed LARRTs.  People respected online privacy and online stalking was a non-issue.  It was a time where people just wanted to connect and really it was the first form of online social networking.  I do miss those days!  But I enjoy these days too so won't be walking away from the internet.


Garden Gnome
©2006-2010

You Are The Apple of My Eye

You Are The Apple of My Eye
January 22, 2010

Oh my gosh! A whole Apple store and just for me? Isn't it a beauty? Well I got the picture by my husband said we did not need any new computer equipment much to my dismay. I am pretty sure I could have found something in that store that I needed ;)

Garden Gnome
©2006-2010

A Comedy of Errors

I was up early then noticed something strange sitting on one of our posts yesterday. My eyes were still sleepy so even the binoculars didn't work well. So I grab my garden clogs to go investigate while still in my pyjamas because no one in their sane mind is up at 5 am except me. Wrong! Now my neighbours know I wear Harry Potter pjs! The mystery item turned out to be a large stack of golf scored cards my husband had sorted while on the dock when the house was being shown the night before. He does the scores for the men's league. Why they were left out there is beyond me but it rained, no actually stormed heavily so all the cards were soaked. So the countertops were covered with drying score cards all day aka no cooking for the day.

I had the great pleasure of getting personal with Bell Sympatico yesterday. Despite the other problems I've had like not being able to access usenet through a newsreader, the only thing that bothered me was for some reason sending email halted. Or so it seemed. I was trying to send a video of the grandbaby to the kids and kept getting error messages. So I call their nice friendly tech support machine that makes me jump through all the hoops by pressing the right buttons. Finally I got a humanoid on the phone. Apparently English was a second language as I could barely understand her. She kept referring to Outlook even though I explained I was using Mail on Mac OS X. She told me to delete all email accounts which wasn't possible because I have two ISPs. Ok then she said to delete the Sympatico account and re-enter all the information. Then she told me to send a test message to see if it would go through. It did so problem solved. Messages were downloading just fine as well. I hung up the phone and tried to send the video message again. Up popped the error message! So I called the friendly tech support machine again, jumped through all the hoops and got another humanoid to whom I related the first problem and what was done. He spoke very broken English and was difficult to understand but somehow walked me through what he thought was the problem. Apparently Macs are foreign computers to Sympatico as the instructions were for Windows. So the preferences were deleted and reinstalled. A test message was successfully sent so problem solved. I hung up then muttered a few not nice words, settled back and tried sending the video message again. Up popped the error message! By now I was not a very happy camper so called up the friendly tech support machine again, jumped through the hoops and got a humanoid. I calmly told him what was happening and what I had done. He asked if I was trying to send an attachment so I told him yes. He asked how big. I told him the file was 32 MB to which he replied that Sympatico only allows attachments upto 20 MB then proceeded to try and sell me other services. Well there you go, almost 2 hours on the phone and finally a reasonable explanation for what was happening and why that particular message wouldn't go though. Why could they not have told me that in the first place? Kudos to Sympatico who will be losing my business as soon as the one year period is up in September.

Ok so that should have been enough for one day, right? Nope! The bluejays came back for a second helping of peanuts. I grabbed the container by the lid which I had neglected to vacuum seal. The peanuts went everywhere covering the kitchen floor. One bluejay was pecking at the window and here I was sitting on the floor just laughing. Hey, it was better than crying!

My husband arrived home with Chinese take-out and six packages of the chicken breasts that were on sale. I had forgotten I asked him to pick up more for another bulk cooking session. I took one look at the chicken, stuffed it in the fridge because the day was jinxed enough. Then he told me about the nice phone call to the guy responsible for getting our boat ready for the spring. You know the guy we pay a lot of money to? Apparently he is having a tiff with the owners of the marina where we keep our boat so people like us are getting caught in between. He didn't do the spring set-up because of those problem which led to us almost being stranded and we did need a tow even though we didn't have to pay for it. Getting a boat towed is costly. Our last tow bill was $700! This guy is holding almost 600 boats hostage just because he is having a tiff with the marina owner. So where is the humour? I started laughing when my husband was telling what was going oh. He asked what was so funny. At least this guy speaks English, I replied.

BTW, the boat problem sounds like a dirty carburetor. Another boater told us what to do and we'll get it checked out from there. My husband has decided this guy won't be touching our boat again and I agree.