it's not the heat, it's the technology
The worst part of the current heat wave, from a getting-work-done angle, anyway, has been the fact that as soon as the ol' thermometer on the barn tops 90 F., the wireless relay gizmo on the water tower a few miles away faints dead away and we lose internet access. This has happened every single day this week. The little doo-dad usually recovers by nightfall; unfortunately, by then I'm in a mood so foul that the cats hide under the furniture, and I'm in no mood to write.
This all reminded me of something I wrote back in 2003, a few months after we installed this system. The part about Windows XP has, fortunately, since been rendered moot, and the reliability of the hook-up has improved considerably, but I think the following still captures how this week has gone:
I've just spent the weekend trying without success to get my wireless internet connection to work properly. Out here in the boonies, where Time-Warner refuses to venture ("Too many squirrels" seems to be the latest excuse), we are poster children for the abject failure to develop rural net access. No cable, no DSL, satellite way too expensive (especially considering that the satellite TV thingy we have doesn't work when it rains), and, thanks to the tin-can-and-string Verizon phone lines, modem access tops out at 24 Kb/s, the speed I had in NYC in 1995.Fortunately, a local ISP has set up a wireless system that beams the net to folks like us from the top of the water tower in town a few miles away. (I'm sure that sounds charmingly rustic to those of you living in civilized places with libraries and bookstores and delicatessens, but, take it from me, water tower in town a few miles away may be one of the most depressing phrases in the English language.)
When this system works it is a thing of beauty, pretty much equivalent to DSL. But it tends to have problems if anything pops up between Word Detective World Headquarters and the water tower in town a few miles away, including, but not limited to, birds, trees, birds sitting in trees, clouds, rain, snow, fog, sleet, hail, heat, cold, plagues of locusts, wind, lack of wind, Windows XP, unusually tall cows, bright sunlight and/or any day ending in "y." If you've always longed to see a man reboot his computer nine times in the space of a single hour, feel free to swing by any old time. Please bring a gun.
But, as I said, when it works it is brilliant, and I am deeply indebted to Stewart, the guy who runs the company, for almost dying of heatstroke last July while installing the cabling in our wasp-infested, 120-degree-plus attic. And Les, who held the ladder for Stuart. Les is also the barber (quite good) I go to when my hair starts drifting towards that Cousin It look. You know you're living in a small town when your barber shows up to install your internet hookup.