Saturday 27 August 2005

Pic of the day: I could have taken a picture of the modem, I guess, but why when I can include this timely commentary from a drunk college girl. "You know, there is a difference between men that are nice and men that are submissive." Yeah. I finally noticed.

Back to modem

It's been almost a week that my DSL has been down, and my ISP (Telenor) has been unable or unwilling to fix it. I am not sure which would be worse. But I am sure it hasn't been fixed, and won't be fixed till Monday, probably not then. From what I understand, some guy should come here on Monday (but it could be another lie like the rest) but it is not obvious that coming here will help in any way, since the problem is not here but at their central. It is only certain that it will cause me to stay home from work.

Anyway, I don't want to spend the entire weekend offline. And I don't want to spend it at work, where we do indeed have DSL but where I don't have my other stuff. And the weekend is likely only the beginning. Then there will be the almost certain problems when I switch to a new ISP, 4- 6 weeks from now. I doubt they will make it work at once. It took weeks to get my current DSL, counting from the day I was promised to get it. Of course, that was Telenor, and they may be particularly bad. But I don't think so. I think they are all bad, Telenor just demands more money for being bad than the rest, since they have the best known brand name (from back when they were a monopoly).

So I went to the Shop of Angels and looked for a modem. I met the computer wizard and RPG expert who I have talked with before. He seems to have some deal with Blizzard now, long may they both live. He also sold me a Jensen USB modem at a reasonable price. It draws its power entirely through the USB cable, and not much at that: I use the 1->4 USB expander without extra power supply, and it still does fine in one of those four ports. It also has a line out to the phone for when the modem is not in use. Which it won't be all of the time, or even much of the time.

The modem works right out of the box. But since my phone line is actually a part split of from my DSL line, the quality is not good enough to keep up the connection for more than a few minutes at a time. Or that is the most plausible explanation. Another thought that is clinging to me is that Telenor makes the line disconnect every few minutes so people have to call up again. There is a start charge for each time you call. I doubt they would be stupid enough to have it break after five minutes though, which seems to be the average. They didn't before, and it wouldn't exactly encourage customers to stay. (Not that this seems to be a priority lately.) Anyway, I call though another phone company, so they won't earn any money from this. I lose money, though. But only a few dollars. I only go online to upload my journals and download e-mail and check my LiveJournal friends, things like that.

So now I have started writing about the last week to catch up. I write an entry, go online and upload it, send a mail to the ONLY person who decided to subscribe to my mailing list (...) and check my own mail. I also try to look at some years-ago entries, but when the connection breaks, I don't call up again at once. Instead I write a new entry. It is slow going, but I intend to describe this week in all its glory. After all, you never know what will come of it. Perhaps when I see Telenor in court, the newspapers will take some interest in the matter. At that time, it might be nifty to have some details written down. (Of course, Telenor might just give in and refund my money. We shall have to see.)

So now I am back to the conditions at the dawn of the Internet: Periodic dial-up. It is still a big leap forward from nothing.