Doing the DSL Happy Dance

I’ve broken down and reacquired DSL services. It’s considerably cheaper than the last time given the pricing wars of the broadband providers. I heard three different ‘get dsl’ commercials on the radio yesterday during 1 commercial break. Maybe it’s a Bay Area thing, but that’s just crazy.

I’m going to be splitting the service with my housemates, so that’s cheap divided by three. Damn, it’s practically free. Of course I had my ritual ‘I hate PPPoE’ swearing session last night as I set up the router to the dsl modem. It’s not tough, but not something that I am able to keep properly in my head. It’s like making cookies from scratch without a recipe. Maybe you get it right and maybe you waste pounds of butter and sugar baking inedible paperweights. I got it working without looking at the instructions, but also without any retainable knowledge of what I did to get it to work properly. I guess I’ll never learn.

So I’m all gleeful and happy to have the service in. I have been thinking this morning why I needed this and why dial-up was so bad. I’ve been using dial-up as my primary means of connecting to the Internet and checking email for 4 months or so. It wasn’t that bad. That is once I got over the high-speed withdrawal. It was about as bad a giving up caffeine. It was weird not seeing all the pictures, and I was able to appreciate sites that had enough text load initially to allow me to navigate without the graphics. I was too poor to do any shopping, so that wasn’t an issue. Plus I was living in someone else’s home for 3 months and it might have been a little rude to get dsl services without their permission. I did consider it and in my head came up with a little story to make it seem like I was doing them a favor. But again the lack of expendable cash was the real decider here.

So why did I get it? Well I got disconnected a lot with the dial-up service. I can’t remember if it happened this much pre-dsl, but it was really annoying to have to keep redialing and reconnecting a dozen times per session. That combined with the cheap prices divided by three made it cheaper than keeping the dial-up. But I know I’ll get hooked on the speed again.

I will be getting rid of my old mindspring e-mail addresses. I’m not even sad about that. I’ve had them for over 10 years, but it doesn’t matter. No one ever remembers them and always assumed that I have a new one. At least that’s the excuse I get when you don’t send me e-mail.

So I suppose this is simplifying to some degree. Letting go of old things. It is a lot easier getting rid of old things that drag along a buttload of spam with them rather than pleasant memories. Speaking of pleasant memories, I’ve got a date with myself this Sunday to week out a bag or two of Goodwill items out of my storage locker. That and make up some long-ass pieces of network cable to run to the other computers in the house. It’ll be fun, really. Okay, my sort of fun.

Tell me what you are doing for fun this weekend.