Wednesday 28 August 2002

Pic of the day: Now I can spend even more time online. For instance in Spraggon Den (Dark Age of Camelot). Or at least pay less for the same time. If it works.

ADSL incoming

Today I ordered ADSL. But not from Tiscali, the company that has been nice enough to send me a letter with the good news that I could now get ADSL. (See my August 22 entry.) Instead I chose Telenor, the former telecoms monopoly of Norway. There are a couple reasons for that.

Firstly the Internet Service Providers use the same infrastructure, namely the one owned by Telenor. By dealing directly with them I hope to avoid the usual blame shifting when things don't work as advertised.

Secondly Telenor was cheaper. It's not a whole lot of money, but still a much faster connection from Telenor costs less than the slowest connection from Tiscali. The downside to this is a download limit of 1 GB a month. I very much doubt that I'm going to hit that ceiling, even if I return to playing online games most of the afternoon. In online games the graphics are stored locally on the PC, and only tokens are passed along between the computer and the server. The things that add up are downloads of large binary files, such as movies or music files or software. Since I don't download pirated stuff, there are not a lot of interesting files out there. Besides, if I exceed their 1 GB limit the only punishment is that my download speed is reduced to 64 kilobits per second for the rest of the month. And that's still more than I have today, and it's still free. (For new readers: I live in Norway where we pay for every minute we stay online. Actually this seems to be the rule for all of Europe, but an exception is made for ADSL.)

Thirdly I already use online.no for my e-mail and to host my Chaos Node. This is the same hosting service that is included with Telenor's ADSL. If all goes well I should not have to change any of this when I switch to the new and better service. This is good for all my sporadic visitors, which are probably most of you. Even my brothers don't visit regularly, but catch up when they feel like it. I consider it important that my web site is still there when they return; not to mention my e- mail address! I would probably have kept my online.no account at least for long while anyway. If I can have it included in the price of my ADSL, I save even more money. And while I don't love money, I don't love to waste it either. Money should be used to make someone happy (even though "someone" is usually myself, I must admit).

Estimated time of arrival for the ADSL is the middle of September.

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I don't know what else to say. I love life, and I wish it didn't have to end. I also like Tsaiko and wish that she didn't have to stop writing. Not that I equate the two in any way, just thought you might want to know.