Drinking From The Internet Fire Hose

I really miss the internet. I have gotten quite attached to that bugger over the last ten years. I think it was around 1996 or 1997 the first time I got on the actual web and snooped around. Back in those days, even big corporate sites were just pages of text on a grey background. There was no Flash, no Cascading Style Sheets, no embedded video. It was raw like tuna sashimi.

Since then we've both grown up and become pretty good friends.

But it's more complicated to get internet in a new house than I had originally thought it would be. BIG CABLE has to come out and verify that there is indeed a house on this lot. Then they need to run new cable from some point to our local box, and from there to our house. The rest is just installation and activation.

But we are stuck in step one. Seems BIG CABLE needs 7-10 work days to do all that complicated cable running and house verifying.

There are six or seven WiFi networks within the grasp of the MacBook, and I must admit I've been "borrowing bandwidth" from some poor local sucker who doesn't have the technical expertise to 1) change the default name of his router from "linksys" to something more descriptive, and 2) turn on even the most rudimentary security protocol. I mean, come on, the Airport Extreme we use just about forces you to turn on some form of access protection. I think after we get our internet up I might try to find this guy and tell him to plug his leak. Note, I said "after" we get our internet up, because I still need him.

(Is that bad of me? I would do the same for him, of course :)

I use WPA2 which is pretty strong, certainly much better than WEP, and not even in the same ballpark as "default", which is pretty much a big neon "Free WiFi" advertisement. And our network name is "WildNet", just to let everyone know there will be crazy things happening on there. Our router lets us generate temporary "guest" passwords that only last one day, so you can let your creepy uncle Harlan check his mail today and know that he won't be spying on you tomorrow and every day thereafter with your golden master password in his sweaty hands.

But I digress.

We hope to be back "on the grid" in the next few days, emailing, blogging, shopping, checking store hours, uploading photos to Flickr, reading RSS feeds, and researching stent procedures and dog doors.

All from the comfort of our own connection.