Technological Travails

Szondy's Law of Upgrades: Never believe the contractor's estimates.

You may have noticed that entries have been a tad light this week. It's my own fault, really. After a year on 56k dial-up we decided to take the plunge and install a satellite Internet link at Chez Szondy. Unfortunately, I was silly enough to believe the contractor when he said he'd show up at 10AM Monday morning.

In Real World time this translates into 12:30 PM Wednesday following repeated phone calls and a few blistering words down the phone by yours truly. When the installer finally appeared he seemed to know his business despite sporting enough tattoos and facial ironmongery to make a Hell's Angel comment that he might be overdoing things. My initial assessment of his competence was tempered, however, by discovering that he'd forgotten to bring a vital bit of equipment and had to leave again to hunt down a colleague who was working on another job somewhere in the mountains. "Somewhere" in this region, I point out, can be anywhere in a forty mile radius. Cue more of yours truly standing about watching the sands of time dropping away into the maw of eternity.

I'd been given to believe that the installation was a matter of a couple of hours work. This did not square with the small mountain of boxes the installer hauled out of his van. We already have satellite television at Chez Sondy, so I was expecting something a little larger than the telly's sat antenna, but I wasn't prepared for what looked like a secondhand death ray bought at a SPECTRE jumble sale that was assembled in my driveway.

After bolting to the wall all the tube steel needed to support the antenna assembly, running an earthing wire into the ground, drilling holes in the wall, and turning my office upside down (one lamp broken) in the process, it was nearly five PM by the time the modem was hooked up and the software downloading from the satellite. The latter took over an hour with another half hour to go through the byzantine registration process.

His job done, the installer left; pointing out that my wireless router was useless with the satellite modem and I'd have to buy a new one.

Spiffing.

Still, I had a high-speed connection at last and I spent the evening testing to see if it lived up to its specifications and reacquainting myself with Youtube clips and RSS feeds that I'd nearly forgotten about. Except for a the odd glitch that I put down to the stray bat being disintegrated by the death ray, I actually had an enjoyable evening.

I went to bed after midnight feeling as if I'd rejoined the 21st century.

Then I checked my e-mail on Thursday morning and felt as if I'd been kicked back to the 19th. My connection speed was reduced to the equivalent of 14k and web pages were loading at a pace I hadn't seen since 1997.

After a morning fiddling with everything I was confident to fiddle with, I called technical support and repeated to him a load of techno-arcania only to be told that I'd exceeded my bandwidth threshold, that the brochures had neglected to mention, and for the next 24 hours I'd be operating a system immersed in cyber-treacle.

Great. I had a high-speed connection that for the rest of the day would be running at a speed more suitable to 1980s bulletin boards.

But the gods weren't through with me yet. By coincidence, my wife's new computer arrived to replace her aging laptop that has been on the edge of electronic death for the past year or so. Delighted, she opened the box and unloaded components. Out came the computer, wireless keyboard and mouse, WiFi link and, unlike prevous computers we'd had, only one wire; the power flex.

However, the monitor was coming under separate cover and, being impatient to get started, my wife decided to hook up the ancient CRT monitor we had stored in the garage.

The monitor was easy enough to find, but somehow the power flex had developed a life of its own and crawled off to seek its fortune. Since it was a bright, sunny day with the temperature in the low 80s, this was a perfect time to hunt around in the unventilated crawl spaces hunting for the spare flex, which had also made off for parts unknown.

I did, however, find an old Walkman that I exacted my revenge upon.