Tech

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Haven't Had to Think About Internet In a Long Time

I’m all set to pull out of Blaine tomorrow morning and am wondering what sort of internet access the next month will bring. Obviously, for such a short period of time I don’t want to invest too much. If I manage to come south next year for three months or more, I will look into getting a US SIM card and air time for my modem, or whatever the best option is at the time.

There appears to be an abundance of wifi hotspots in Eugene, so the plan right now is to find the nearest one to where I’ll be staying and visit it once a day. I really can’t go for more than a day without internet, so now that I have a laptop doing a hotspot run isn’t going to be too onerous.

 

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A Tad on Edge

I just went to bed and found one of my pillows had fallen between the top of the mattress and the wall. It was wedged in tightly, so I gave it a yank. It pulled loose and then there was a massive thud that shook the rig. I thought that the loft was collapsing!

Just as I was going to throw myself down I noticed the very full and very heavy jug of desicant crystals that had gotten caught with the pillow and dropped almost a foot! Thud indeed!

I’ll definitely feel better once I’ve resealed all my seams!

(posted from my iPod Touch)

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Fourteen Year Anniversary of Living With the Internet

November 23, 1996, at about 6PM, I took my first steps onto the information super highway. I made a note of this occasion in my diary because I could recognize that it would be a watershed moment in my life.

I am at an age where I can cleanly separate life pre and post internet. I have lived just about exactly half my life at this time in both eras. The technology grew during my college and university days and I saw the world change overnight. In April of 1998, I was still doing homework on a typewriter; six months later I wasn’t allowed to use a dot matrix printer for churning out essays; and two years later I was getting bonus credit for submitting my papers as web pages.

Ultimately, I am grateful for the internet, even if I am much too dependent on it. I have always had a thirst for knowledge that libraries and bookstores couldn’t slake and now I have all the knowledge I could want at my fingertips. I have also made some truly remarkable, life-long, friendships through the web. I sometimes spend too much time mindlessly surfing and not enough time reading books, but when all is added up, the internet has been a Good Thing in my life.

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Air Card Usage Disagreement

Last month, I logged into the Telus website to check my airtime usage and noticed an incredible anomaly: nearly two GB of transfer on a day when I was on the road. It wasn’t possible! I don’t get those kinds of speeds, I know better than to do huge downloads or streaming or whatever, especially since I knew that I was only halfway through my billing cycle and already at 4GB.

I called Telus immediately and was told there was nothing that could be done until I got my bill. It came today and it was for twice what it should have been. After a half hour on the phone with them, including requesting that I be transferred to the original tech person’s supervisor, I managed to get the overage for this month waived, but was warned that they will never do that again.

I could not get them to acknowledge that that day of excessive transfer was an obvious anomaly, however it happened. I pointed out that when I went over a couple of months ago, I paid it. I also made note of the fact that my biggest day of data transfer in six months was half a gig, a long way from two gigs!

My billing cycle has reset, so I’m going to be even more vigilant in watching it as I go back to using my aircard. There’s another concern: roaming. Being on a border town, there is a chance of my aircard catching a US tower. Telus says there is absolutely nothing they can do to keep me from roaming (not sure I believe that). So, I’m not really motivated to use my aircard here, even though the service is great, since roaming fees would be even worse than excess bandwidth fees. Augh!

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Urban Dry Camping Has Its Pluses

My computer battery ran out of juice mid-afternoon. I was going to recharge it with the house battery since it’s sunny out and the solar panel compensates for the computer’s draw. Then, I realised that there’s a Starbucks across the parking lot. I bought a Venti-sized drink to give myself as much legitimate time as possible at the café and stayed forty-five minutes, long enough to buy me 3.5 hours of computer time. I pulled this same trick earlier this summer when I was camping in Whitehorse and needed a place to plug in my camera.

I didn’t even use their wi-fi; my aircard is just so speedy down here. I need to start watching my bandwidth usage now that I can stream video and download at warp speed!

(I do have to say that surrounded by netbooks and 13″ laptops, I came to realise just how big a 17″ model is!)