So the broadband crapped out this morning. At first I could load most of the university home page, just not that important little bit that allows me to log in and therefore surf beyond the university home page. And then not even the home page would load. I’m not happy about this. This dial-up does work, most of the time, but it’s not cheap and it’s about as reliable as any other dial-up. So in a minute I’ll get offline and read a book. Ahh, books, I have fond memories of books way back in the days before the internet….. Well, I just inherited a bunch of books from a friend who decided repatriation was a better idea than hanging around here forever, and they look pretty interesting, and I have been meaning to drag myself away from the computer and read them, so I guess a crapped out broadband is a good motivator.
Huh. Sometimes it seems like all our friends in Beijing are moving to America or trying to move to America or wanting to be trying to move to America.
And on that note, I will unplug myself and get reacquainted with the real world. And books.
But hopefully this crapped out broadband is only a temporary problem. I won’t be happy if I have to go back to spending extremely short periods of time on the dial-up or wandering over to the office to get a China Uselesscom signal. Alright, unplugging now. Really.
You’d think they wouldn’t have problems like this in the States, wouldn’t you? Wrong. A friend of mine has had no Internet access for five weeks because that’s how long it’s taken for his ISP to get round to fixing it.
Y’know, I think this is one area in which China is a million times more efficient than any developed country, bizarre as that may sound. Yeah, so I don’t get a wireless signal in my apartment, the dial-up and wireless are slow and unreliable, and every now and then the broadband isn’t broad enough to even load the university home page so I can’t sign in, but still, I’ve never had to go without internet access for longer than a day. Travelling doesn’t count, though. But even travelling it’s easy enough. Shit, I could take the lap top up the mountains behind the in-law’s village and still get online.