The Return of the Wired Build Engineer
Over a month ago now, I blogged about the... "hilarity" that ensued when I moved into a (pretty nice) new apartment that... had no Internet (or cable, for that matter) connection to speak of.
In the ensuing month+, I've learned the following things:
- My apartment turned out to be the only apartment in the entire F#!(*!!9#% complex that didn't have a cable connection. Go figure.
- Google Wifi is... ok. But you can't really rely on it too much. I think it only worked a few times because there were low clouds, or something, because it never really worked again after I blogged about it.
On the other hand, I never got an external antenna, and I don't assume it's supposed to work from your bedroom.
- Home owner's associations move slowly.
- Contractors that are "the cheapest bid" move even slower.
- Drilling holes in concrete to run eensy-weensy wires through is fun!
Oh wait, no... what's the complete opposite of fun? Oh yeah... loud.
- When you have no TV and no Internets, your DVD collection becomes relatively... important. And DVDs you had forgotten you owned become surprisingly interesting again!
- Despite this, you can only watch so much [[QaF]] before... you just can't really watch it anymore.
I never thought I'd get there, but... here we are.
- At some point, you start to care less about the "why" to the whole question about "wires being cut to your apartment in some painting/remodeling accident" and you start to care more about the "What the H&#@$! are you going to do about it in a not-six-month-timeframe?"-question
- Planning a flight without innerwebs is hard. And has not-so-great results (in terms of less-pilot-stress; in terms of artistic beauty, the results were spectacular...)
- When the innerwebs return to you after being gone for a month,
- The Flickrsphere is brighter.
- The You-Tubes are tubier.
- The Blah-go-sphere is emo-er.
- The bugs are bugier.
- The torrents seem torrent-ier.
It's like I'm a teenager again, running pine on an OSF/1 box for the first time.
And everything is new.
There's probably something to be said for the fact that I haven't really felt as "moved in" to this new place until this evening, when I could actually write email(s) from my couch. There's probably something... pathological about that.
But for now, I'm going to bask in the niceness of it.
More as I catch up.
On everything.
(Interesting factoid: it literally took my computer at home some 30+ minutes to process my entire mailspool with spamassassin; and my computer is a 3 GHz Pentium 4, so it's not like it's slow. I also found about 10 emails that I hadn't seen among all the spam. That's... wow... in a depressing sort of way.)