welcome to the nineties

For someone with my reputation for loving gadgets and technology you may be surprised to know that I relied on dial-up internet access right up until yesterday. I may have embraced digital photo and video editing years ago, been building websites for a decade, creating flash applications et al et al… but until yesterday I was still listening to that ring tone followed by a whine and praying that it would connect so I could spend three hours downloading a 15 second youtube movie.

It was a golden time filled with hope, anticipation and ultimately disappointment. I would cross my fingers that I could connect, three attempts later and my 23kbps would fill me with joy unbounded. I would write a couple of short novels as the % download complete bar would tick slowly along; and then somewhere between the 85%-90% mark windows update would discover I needed something important and bring the whole connection to a snails pace before dropping it completely.

It took a month, some bizarre telephone conversations to Delhi (I presume), three BT engineers, three BT vans, several trips to the telephone exchange and three separate routers – but now the bad old days of dial-up are at an end. I should apologise to anyone who had an emergency telephone incident and couldn’t find an engineer to fix it for two days – they were all at my house. Nice guys they are too.

So broadband has made my life better? It has enabled me to go on the computer, complete my tasks in seconds and then log off and do something fun?

Ah, no. If only. Now I just fill that time with even more useless, inane tasks. Now I’m spending even more time online, but doing less – how does that work exactly?