shows to go ya
I spoke too soon. Our wireless internet connection went down this afternoon for about five hours, as it does every Friday afternoon. Who knows?
We get our net connection via a repeater link on top of the water tower in town about two miles away. As I mentioned a few years ago, the phrase the water tower in town probably strikes some of y'all as charmingly rustic and Green Acre-ish, but, trust me, you don't want to depend on the water tower in town for anything, especially not internet access. The water is horrible too, actually (and besides, we have our own well with our own horrible water).
We could get Verizon DSL, but the phone lines out here are so awful it probably wouldn't be any better than dialup, and the infrastructure is so primitive we can't even get voicemail.
So I paid a visit to dial-up-land and connected at 48k, which is useless. Ugh, feh. Funny thing is that if we could settle for that, it would be free, because AOL gave me a free "media" account ten years ago when I was writing a book about the internet and they forgot to turn it off. Every six months or so I log on, check my non-existent mail, and bask in the warm glow of getting something for free, even if it is only AOL (where it will, apparently, always be 1995 -- those people are scary).