I had no pressing responsibilities at school this week, so I went to Vacaville. May as well start Thanksgiving early.
This means, unfortunately, that I am back to using dial-up. Ah, dial-up, how I loathe thee… let me count the ways.
- Gmail has gone from being instantaneous to a thirty-second wait between screens.
- A five-minute podcast now takes 25 minutes to download. Forget about the half-hour ones.
- Oh, yeah, I started subscribing to a video podcast. The latest episode is available tomorrow. Guess how many hours that one’s gonna take?
- Forget using Skype, my internet phone service.
- Forget multitasking on the internet: Reading news sites while downloading news podcasts.
- The news sites likewise take 30 seconds. Unless I open more than one page at the same time. Then they’re longer.
All the minimal wait times that I used to ignore… now are multiplied by 50 or more. Dial-up sucks. Guess I’m going to the coffeehouse a lot this week.
But that is my only real complaint about being in Vacaville. Thanksgiving should be fun… except they’re talking about playing board games as part of the Thanksgiving entertainment. Games? A nice idea, but I expect to do what I usually do for Thanksgiving: After eating three desserts and telling the family and assorted guests what I’m thankful for, I get to sit in a big armchair and watch a few movies in a L-tryptophan-induced stupor. Oh well; maybe my brain will be active enough to answer a few low-intelligence trivia questions.