Yeah, I Remember The Stone Age
Posted by Saintsteven on August 31, 2010 under Silently Thinking Out Loud | 
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It’s amazing how quickly things can sometimes snap around and go back to Before There Was Today’s Version Of The Future.
I had a particularly fruitful time fiddling with the site yesterday and when I put my weapons down last night I had that rare feeling I had accomplished something. Today there were four orders in the hopper, “about right” for a Tuesday, but one of them sort of challenges this physical anomaly of mine that isn’t actually cool with fourteen pound packages so I went slow and stuff and made really beautiful packages. I should take a picture of them and upload it and show it to you.
However, that might take forever because I am presently (composing offline and) using the MSN dial-up account I pay for but never use because of a baffling problem with the cable provider. Yes, that means they want money, but it’s a bizarre amount which would take three months to accumulate and I just spoke to them a month ago about the same kind of blip.
On that occasion, the guy said, “hmm, this is strange. You’ve been disconnected due to non-payment but your account is current. This never should have happened. We’re very sorry, I’ll reauthorize you to use the Internet.”
This time it went quite differently, and while I expected to actually PAY them a hundred and thirty-six bucks which is way-the-hell-too-much for a month’s worth of cable tv and Internet, I had to tell them “hmmm, I am not sure I have that much in the account I was just going to give you, I better think about that outrageous number because it’s so different from what the last rep from your place told me when he said we were current”.
So, anyway, this is not about them, they are obviously not on our side and I have turned to my handy-dandy MSN dial-up account I pay for every month and never use just in case something like this happens because I thought from the git-go the cable company seemed like ruthless insane bastards.
It is good for any of us to be reminded of where we came from I suppose.
Dial-up was good enough for me for my first six years or so, and that was where I built the fun exciting part of my sterling reputation we all see today. But over the past five years, especially in terms of supporting myself with my own site, I happen to notice things have changed. I probably haven’t used dial-up in a little over a year, and that was during some cable outage that didn’t last too long, but I have a LOT of trouble thinking about the impending week on low-speed.
A “typical” “serious” listing night for me at eBay means sending up around 40 big photos to my site and eBay close to simultaneously and all sorts of other whiz-bang file transfers to which I have become accustomed. I haven’t tried FTP over dial-up yet, but I can just imagine……..it took me a little over two minutes to log into my bank account.
So I may very well have to return to some “roots” and some primitive procedures just to keep juggling the balls.
Especially since the MSN access number is long distance. And until I can get at a telephone bill, I don’t know what’s smarter: long sessions or short bursts. We don’t have an “unlimited” plan. We DO have a plan that charges next to nothing for many long calls, but I sort of suspect there’s a connect charge of twenty cents or something so we don’t want me doing THAT a dozen times an hour for twelve hours a day if there is.
So already I’m back to one of the original guerilla tactics I used in the first place: offline preparation (from back in the days when I launched This Empire without even owning a computer).
Might make me smarter, and maybe I need to BE smarter. If your first impression is “ruthless insane bastards” and you don’t follow your instinct, maybe twice shy is appropriate.
