This IS The Day

This might very well be my last post about Life Without Cable TV. Probably a good thing, that. Inevitably, a topic which sounded mostly like a survivor's tale. Which I intended. But, too often, the survivor just words away from a rant. I like a good rant, true. It's like blowing out my nose into someone else's hankie. I breathe so much freer after. But that wouldn't be very neighbourly of me, hootling that into a borrowed hankie, so I have resisted the urge.

And nope, no rant coming here. I've happily gone HIGH-SPEED, y'see.

I'd been waiting, years already. For government de-regulation to do its thing. For competition among internet service providers to bring us Canadian little folk the good deal. At least the better deal. Enough waiting already, I decided yesterday. Stopped by Lansdowne Mall. At Windmobile's kiosk. Came away with a Huawei E1691 data stick, and the 10-gig plan for 35-bucks Canadian. The closest plan to Unlimited I could currently find.

Last night, I plugged the Huawei E1691 data stick in a USB port on the old HP desktop which passes for my internet portal to the world and beyond. As it was supposed to, the E1691 installed its management dashboard thingy: here's where I'd connect to the web, disconnect, view my usage stats, and so on.

Yup, roamin' 'round the web, I've read folks callin' the Huawei E1691 slow, compared to the newer faster shinies out there. Maybe I'll call it slow too, in time. I make no apologies now, though, and am impressed with its 7.2 megabits per second performance. A definite improvement over my 52 dial-up bits per second. The 21st century come at last to my half-century old three-storey walk-up!

I'd tried having wired broadband put in, maybe four years ago. It wouldn't work. I'd decided then wireless was the way to go. This place still uses glass screw-ins in the fuse-box, after all.

But that's all yesterday now. I don't have to move somewhere gremlins haven't been gnawing the wiring for decades. Nor double my rent in the move. I didn't even have to shift the old HP closer to any window...

Last night, inside a couple hours, I flashed around the worldwide web. Glimpsed all my fave sites, in record time. Updated myself on local news. Watched BBC news online. Watched a buncha interesting videos. NASA's GRAIL project: Ebb beaming home a beautiful fly-by from the far side of the moon. And Mythbusters. And music. So much great music!

I even found This is The Day, by The The. A longtime fave. A spectacularly fitting nice thing I'd like to share with you.



The old tv in the corner still pulls in one channel over the air. It likely would pull in more, if I ever get around to wiring in an ATSC box and antenna. As it is, I did see and enjoy the Grammys this past Sunday.

Y'know, currently, I'm satisfied with my hash of tech. Okay, so it does seem like I'm riding the tortoise of time, through today, into tomorrow. Yeah, still, I'm comfy.

The Russians...Are Here

Okay. So it’s a grainy pic, snapped during grey drizzle about noon on about the last day of January. Snapped with the office Nikon CoolPix, which usually sees duty photo-recording work-related stuff that’ll be reported on in fascinating work-related emails to persons-in-charge who reside in exotic locales I might like to vacation in. I’m probably the only one in here inclined to so...broaden the CoolPix’s photographing experiences.

I started to hear...geese. Work is in the vicinity of Vancouver Airport. I won’t be more specific about work, simply because it’s boring. Vancouver Airport, aka YVR, sprawls over a low island dyked off from the surrounding Fraser River estuary and the sea. YVR is on the flyway, not only for migrating humans, let’s just say. I’d heard geese before. It wasn’t remarkable.

I kept working. I heard more geese. Looked up. Saw nothing remarkable out the front windows. Yet more geese honked overhead. I stopped working, dashed for the Nikon CoolPix, because now I could also hear jet airliners, engines spooling on the taxiway and not going anywhere.

It looked like an invasion crossing the grey sky, west to east. Those snow geese aren’t from around here, by the way. They’re Russian.