dialup
You are viewing stuff tagged with dialup.
You are viewing stuff tagged with dialup.
Cheaper telecom - Aha, looks like the combination of voice over IP technology and broadband can be cheaper than dial-up and phone service. Intriguing.
I am unsure how much more of this I can take: dial-up internet is the worst thing to happen to this decade, and I am stuck on what seems to be the last copper-line connection to the internet out of anyone I know. I recently read that over one half of the people who use the internet are not using dial-up. And don’t get me wrong - the internet is something I rely on to do my job - I’m not complaining because I can’t watch streaming video on MTV’s website when I spend hours mindlessly surfing. In fact, dial-up works quite well for the surfing I do - generally reading longer articles, allowing things to load in the background.
I just spent four days connecting my sister’s Dell computer running Windows 98 to the internet. I had the privilege of meeting the wonderful people at AT&T tech chat, and of learning far more than I wanted to ever know about modems.
Do Tell
Turns out her computer had been set up to log on to a network, which in turn somehow produced many extraneous TCP/IP entries in her “Network” settings. Weeding these out finally allowed the modem to talk to the outside world successfully. My shout of joy was an intense one when I finally dialed up and Google showed its friendly logo.
The password to this login area is so long, I wonder if it sometimes it just lets me in on account that I took the time to attempt to spell the password correctly. Well, not really spell it, but assemble the characters in a nearly-correct-order. That reminds me, I changed my dialup access number and now I can’t recognize my IP in the hit section of the backend of this website. Strange. I’ll learn it soon, or get so bugged that I’ll just change the number back. 56k is not gonna happen anyways - this modem just doesn’t play well with anybody’s server. Back in the day, when I used to call Matt’s home number and his modem picked up and we played the original Nascar … peer2peer - that was cool. My ICQ number is fairly low - 11 million something. Guess I’m just reminiscing about my early days online. Windows 3.1, running all my programs off the zip drive; back when 2x was a ‘quick’ CD read speed. In the scheme of things, this was not that early - but compared to the time all of my peers and classmates got online - it was a while before that. I remember criticizing AIM while chatting on ICQ. Then AIM started making some advances that ICQ just couldn’t match and then ICQ got bought by AOL. That really wasn’t fun. So, grudgingly, we figured out how to register on AOL and got our screen names on. The switch took a while to get used to. To this day, AIM lives on the right side of my screen and ICQ on the left. Now I remember, I made an skin for ICQ once. Hmm - that took a while. It always surprises me to think how much time I have wasted spent on Paint Shop Pro images, online chatting, HTML coding, calculator game downloading/playing, website designing and web site destroying. I wonder what would lie before me if all of this time had been channeled towards one massive effort. For example, if I had made one huge, PHP and mySQL database driven website, there would be a big something. Or, how about if I had copied every CD i have come across since I got the equipment; how much music would I have? How many laws would I have broken? Case in point; I started Lifetime years ago and go there regularly. This could be considered a “massive effort.” I do not wish to brag about, embellish, or describe in detail the results of such an effort but it does give me a sense of satisfaction/accomplishment. I think that is what I am craving.