The Boy Racer

A few days ago I signed on to the SBC-Yahoo DSL service, whose advertisements are ubiquitous on the internet. I've used dial-up modems to connect to the internet for as long as I've been connecting to the internet. Of course, I've known how slow dial-up is--my computer at work has a broadband connection--but only now has the price for high-speed access come down low enough for me to afford it. I'm only paying a couple bucks more a month for internet speed that is at least 20 times faster than what I can get with dial-up.

I won't say it has "revolutionized" my internet use, but it has enabled me to do a lot of things that I couldn't do in the past. For instance, I can now stream the films from the Prelinger Archive rather than download a poor quality file (which would still take a couple of hours to do at dial-up speeds). I've also been able to download some TV shows about the same time it takes to watch them. I've recently found a bunch of those "ghost hunting" shows that apparently one can find on cable TV nowadays. They are comedy gold, especially one show called "The Girly Ghosthunters" which features 4 squeamish women investigating haunted locales in Canada. That show is the best because the women seem more afraid of spiders and getting cobwebs in their hair than they are afraid of the ghosts they are investigating. I've only seen one episode of "The Girly Ghosthunters," but it has whet my appetite for more.

The only problem with my new DSL connection is that my computer is just barely capable of handling it. I need a new computer anyway, so hopefully it won't be long before my hardware can handle my software.