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Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Dial-Up and an Economy of Bandwidth

I have had broadband once again for just over a year now (the last time I had broadband was for about the same time) and I had to switch back to dial-up for the time-being due to finances and the fact that my company screwed-up my billing. Get this, because this truly angers me and I want everyone to know it: TDS (my provider) freely admits they made a mistake and overcharged me, but insists I pay them the inflated amount to keep my services operating and the adjustment will be on the next bill!!! Have you ever heard of such bullshit!? I might be able to come up with some way to pay the "past-due" amount, but it would hurt, and there really is a point to be made here - I mean what kind of shit is that!?

Anyway, in preparation for the return to dial-up suckage, I should have been filing my taxes, consolidating mailboxes and addresses, making any changes to profiles and webpages and so on. You know what I did? I watched all three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in marathon runs.

It is what it is. I have no one to blame for my not doing the things I know I probably should have, but honestly, I didn't do the things I needed to when I had a surplus of bandwidth; a lot of the time, I was dicking-around, watching YouTube and Hulu and just surfing from one related point of interest to the next as it so pleased me.

But I'm going to do something worthwhile this time around - this downgrade around, I guess I should say: I'm going to test the economy of bandwidth and my use of it. By that, I mean that I can no longer just leave the computer connected because I have to be able to accept calls occasionally, so I'm going to see what I can do offline to maximize the time spent online.

We all know what that means, but it's so easy to disabuse yourself of such things whenever you can load IMdB at the drop of a hat just to see if the guy you caught a glimpse of is that one guy who was in that movie with that other guy, that I want to make a concerted effort to find out what all, exactly, it is that I am doing, that I need to do, and actually end up doing. I really want to make a study of the matter to some degree, just to contrast and compare. Behaviorally speaking, I figure this is exactly what I, as the Cyberculturalist, should be concerned with.

That and porn. Porn on dial-up. Those things.

And while that's technically where this should end, I want to mention that I noticed my posts were more relevant - and by that, I mean more relevantly linked, cross-referenced, and generally researched - when I was on dial-up than when I had broadband. That's a real bell-ringer there; I mean, shouldn't it follow that I would be more apt to write better posts when I'm able to research quicker and so forth? And yet, I think it's that very mindset which impedes it; when I know it takes longer to load and so forth, it makes me focus more on it as "work."

See? That's the kind of thing I, as the Cyberculturalist, should be concerned with.

And the porn thing. Those two things.

© C Harris Lynn, 2009
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