At long last.
Having run out of wired options, I’ve gone wireless – I bought myself a Plug2surf. This is an el cheapo CDMA 1x modem, and is about as fast as a dialup connection. It’s a big come down from broadband speeds, but I’m old enough to remember the time when a 64 Kb/sec. shared connection was a very big deal indeed. I remember spending days on end downloading a 5 MB scilab tarball. Oh well…
At any rate, this means I can start blogging again. From all the folks I’ve talked to, the Plug2surf is slow, but reliable. Hopefully it lives up to its reputation.
The most interesting (and rewarding) thing I did this weekend was to entertain my son by covering Ritchie Blackmore on the Air Guitar, and John Bonham on the Air Ludwigs. Of course, (recordings of) the real items were playing in the background.
It is indeed heartening to find that even at six months of age, my son seems to show signs of having inherited my musical tastes. There are a few things that he likes, and he welcomes them by flashing his trademark million-watt toothless smile. Among these are his mother and grandfather – it pleases me to no end that Smoke on the water and Immigrant Song find a place in his list. It does sadden me that his other grandparents haven’t been able to spend much time with him. There’s nothing much I can do about that, and that hurts as well. My father used to carry me around on his shoulder when I was little, and I was hoping that he would do the same with my son. It looks as though this is not to be. Only Time, that ugly four-letter word, can tell.
Update:
One of the biggest advantages of having a laptop and a USB stick wireless modem is that you can fluff up two of your most comfortable pillows, put them behind your back, stretch out with the lower half of your body amply covered by a warm duvet, and proceed to comfortably browse the web with the laptop warming your lap. There does seem to be some kind of difference in the modem’s speed on WinBloze and Linux. There are other folks on the net who seem to have experienced this “phenomenon” – whether it is physical or psychological, I am unable to say. Unfortunately, the only operating systems that run on my laptop are different flavours of Unix – one of which is Linux – so I’m not able to run any meaningful tests to confirm or deny that claim. I did try out the modem on my desktop, which boots WinBloze as well as Linux. I got download speeds of up to 8 KB/sec on both OSes, but somehow the modem *seems* faster on WinBloze. It could be because of this app called Speed+ that came along with the modem’s dialer. Now, this thing claims to be an “accelerator” – my hunch is that it’s nothing more than a sophisticated caching mechanism. Anyway, it looks like I’ve hit upon an internet connection that works – as compared to the old ones that worked half the time or less – I’m hoping that it continues to work – not always slowly, but definitely steadily. Ha.
Update #2
Ah ha. Apparently CDMA 1x should be able to give you 40 – 60 Kbit/sec, and a peak rate of 144 Kbit/sec. This figures – 8 Kbyte/sec is 64 Kbit/sec. It looks like CDMA 3x gives you all of 2 Mbit/sec. – but who knows when we’re going to get CDMA 3x here? And the Venturi thing seems to be a little bit more complicated than just an intelligent caching mechanism. It looks like the wireless service provider has to install some fancy hardware and get their customers to install the Venturi client to take advantage of this hardware. What does this hardware do? I have no idea, except that a) it runs Linux and b) It speaks VTP, which is supposedly Venturi’s replacement for TCP – now, don’t take this at face value, all of this information is gleaned off google, and I have no idea if it’s true or false. I am riled that though the Venturi hardware supposedly runs Linux, they don’t have a Venturi client for Linux. Grr. Oh, will I ever get to have a reliable broadband connection at home? Will I, ever?
