Damn technological wasteland One door closes…and then opens up again to let someone else in Introducing Radioactive Levee
...err...well actually you did say "...lose my shit...", so, technically, you did swear in the first paragraph. And then, of course, you go to town with the potty mouth later in the post.
By Anonymous, at
11:47 AM
Oh fine. Well, that's not the important bit. The important bit is that nobody is dead, despite my overwhelming conviction at the time that somebody ought to be.
Well, alternately, you could take Telstra's marketing spiel at its word and actually ring the Area General Manager for Canberra with your complaint. Or at least have someone to direct your mighty ire at 8^)
By Anonymous, at
4:56 PM
There are a couple of things you can try: If you get together with as many neighbours as possible to put in expressions of interest (even bogus ones, I suspect)for ADSL to bigpond's website, your area will go up in priority when they add exchanges etc. (they will eventually service all urban areas from what I've heard from an insider). I know of someone who has done this successfully.
Dave, I'm no kanji expert, but I had no idea how your "Japanese Name" was generated. So I tried mine, and got equally baffling results. So I asked Mari, and she had no idea how they were made. So we tried her name, and got nothing resembling her kanji. Oh well.
By winstoninabox, at
10:42 PM
"Does anyone have any suggestions that might achieve or even faintly simulate decent online access?"
Looks like monkeys is the way to go. Cable is just way too expensive. ISDN is only a marginal improvement on plain ol' analogue. It might actually be cheaper to look at the microwave/wireless deal I was checking out a few weeks ago...
The translations are accurate.
By winstoninabox, at
11:49 PM
We don't know nothing about World of Warcraft, but have been pleasantly surprised that you can play Final Fantasy XI perfectly well on dial-up, something that wasn't supposed to be possible...
I'm going to give it a shot. From what I've been able to gather, I should only suffer lag in areas with a high PC population (like the capital cities), so we'll see. I'm going to gamble my month of free registration on a test (since the alternative is waiting 6-12 months for improved broadband services...)
I have managed to stay away from it so far. I think it is something like heroin. This is what Amanda says: "It is the most complicated, frustrating, interesting on multiple levels, and addictive game I have ever played and I still don't want to play anything else after about nine months." She has played FFXI for aproximately 60 days of real time since April- so about 30% of her waking life. Frighteningly, this is considerably less than Andrea has played in the same period...
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
After two calls and another visit to the Telstra shop, I have now determined beyond all doubt that there is no possibility of getting anykind of (Telstra) ADSL link to my house. It is, apparently, too far from the exchange to maintain connection integrity. This information, which was delivered after a quick line check by a young guy whose apologetic shrug was somewhat dampened by his obvious expectation that I was going to lose my shit, came as both surprise and disappointment. I don’t think I was nurturing some delusional hope in expecting that, less than three kilometres from the centre of the national capital, the electrons coursing through my phone line would be sufficiently virile as to carry a few thousand extra bits of signal every second. Even with twenty four hours’ grace to burn off the warm burst of incoherent rage that settled comfortably in my throat and temples as I tried to digest this news, I still don’t believe I was asking too much in expecting to be able to access a reasonably-priced broadband connection of modest performance.
Wow. I got through that whole paragraph without swearing. Albeit only after several edits.
There are several real difficulties arising from this news. Leaving aside the fact that I still really want to play World of Warcraft, a wondrous magical land whose Swirly Portals of Egress are looking increasingly Closed To Me. Even leave aside the fact that I’ve paid for and installed the game (though thankfully I haven’t opened an online account yet, which would now be lying fallow and sucking up monthly fees for no adequate return). First there’s the cost of the immediate alternatives, which are cable broadband - available through a single provider whose pricing structures are byzantine and not especially affordable - and dialup. Bigpond’s dialup service is riddled with spam (filters available for an extra change) and slow. Really slow. I mean, you may think Tarkovsky movies drag a little towards the end, but that’s just peanuts to the dismal connection speeds afforded by Bigpond’s ghastly dialup service. It takes me upwards of forty minutes to download a week’s mail at the moment (95% of which consists of conspicuously unfiltered spam). With my current account, that means I burn up my monthly timed connection limit just checking email, let alone doing anything on the web (and if I do, need I say it, it proceeds at a glacial crawl).
While Fiona’s modem is a creaky old thing limited to 19.2 kBps, I’m pretty sure that an upgrade is not going to help much – the Bigpond connection rarely gets up to such dizzying velocities – so I throw myself on the mercy of those with broader technical horizons. Does anyone have any suggestions that might achieve or even faintly simulate decent online access?
So Alastair’s leaving for Adelaide tomorrow (assuming he receives some sort of divine intervention that helps him finish packing by tonight). But already we’ve been offered the opportunity to fill the void in our lives left by one less person in the house – either Kate (who asked first) or Jimbo (who sort of has the prior claim) might be joining us at Casa del No Fucking Broadband by the end of the month. Or week, who knows? I like to entertain the notion that they are fighting, perhaps with pistols or knives, for the chance to occupy the cramped little closet under the stairs. I suppose in reality they will resolve the issue with polite debate, like little babies, but one habitually tends to entertain such little fantasies when one doesn’t have the fucking internet to distract one, doesn’t one?
So, there’s this Japanese name generator doing the rounds, and apparently…well, see for yourself:
My japanese name is 川添 Kawazoe (riverside) 大輝 Taiki (large radiance).
Take your real japanese name generator! today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.
Hmm. Not so sure about that first part, but the second sounds kind of hardcore. Mind you, I don’t feel all wide and radiant right at the moment, let me tell you.
11 smartarse remarks
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11 Comments:
Just sayin'.
Da simonster
Somebody grossly overpaid, for preference.
das iMacster
If you are content to spend more to be up and running quickly, I would suggest the cable (or ISDN) rather than satellite. I'm not sure, but I think satellite has more "delay" issues which would be a problem with gaming I think.
well, you could always move to japan. broadband's as cheap as chips here... & fast. woo! fast. we got kinda slow broadband, & yeah, woo, it's still fast...
i mean, you know, now that you have a japanese name & all... ummm... is this helping? no?
maybe you could follow up on marco's suggestion?
or, if you could find enough really small, really fast monkeys you could train them to carry the additional electrons back & forth between your place & the exchange... we have lots of monkeys in japan. unlike australia, which has no monkeys. monkeys are a bit like broadband, really.
As for my Japanese name, I assume it's just a collection of thrown-together kanji based on groups of letters in the name. Is the translation actually acurate, by the way?
So what's FFXI like? I've been playing a bit of Simon's copy of FF X on his PS2, and while the story's reasonably engaging, these must be the talkiest bunch of boors in the history of gaming. What makes it worse it the appallingly bad voice acting...
