Thursday, July 07, 2005

...and no birds sang...

The man he came at six o'clock
The man he came at six o'clock
The man he came at six o'clock
And now I'm gonna cry.

It's this goddamned cathedral I live in.

The cathedral of trees.

Our Lady of the Larches, the Chartres of the Chestnuts.

Blocking the line of sight from the transmitter, you see. The bosky microwave penetrateth not the green lushy walls.

Foiled by the Beauty, oh the Arnie, the Postmodern Arnie....

But all is not lost. The Man Who Came speaks of a repeater station to be emplaced on a nearby silo that will receive the microwaves, translate them into tree-conquering 900-gigaschmertz thingummies, and Bob, he cheerfully implied, would be my uncle. And when shall this great Bob-enuncling day arrive?

Oh, Real Soon Now.

I will retire to my bed, then, mumbling a phrase only too familiar in these degraded times: That which does not kill me makes me stronger, that which does not kill me makes me stronger, that which does not kill me makes me stronger....

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cut the damn trees down, Ned. You know it makes sense.

Neddie said...

Are you my uncle?

Kevin W. Baker said...

Poor baby. Still, there's nothing like a dialup connection to make you aware of how bloated and silly most sites and pages have gotten. We have all this flash (and Flash) and bells and whistles, but not really much better content. I remember my first old 14.4 dialup connection. Funny, the Internet seemed pretty fast back then. Today, I'm sitting here with a screaming fast cable connection and waiting for some of these bloated, out-of-control sites to load. Give me some plain, clean old-school HTML any day. Because the truth is that even with screaming broadband, well-optimized pages still load faster than poorly designed ones.

Kevin W. Baker said...

But don't worry, you'll have your broadband soon. And yeah, it is fun. I installed a wireless network in my house, and now I blog from the toilet!

Kevin W. Baker said...

Okay that made me laugh really hard. I'm so damned jealous of people who can write stuff that rhymes.

Anonymous said...

14.4 res publica? Get a grip. Some of us ole timers remember filing copy on a TRaSh-80 (and boy, what I wouldn't give to have that lightness in hand again) at 300. So don't make me pull old fart rank on you, whippersnapper.

Neddie said...

Screw that noise, Dwire! When I got started in this bidness, we used to cart the goddamned ones and zeros around in a wheelbarrow! We carved 'em out of stone! With chisels! Like Real Men! Bits per second? Hah! We measured 'em in bits per hour!

Problem is, Res, I moved out here from Siphilization a year ago, and before that we had out screamin' fast cable connection, with AirPort Extreme wireless household network, the whole shebang. I too surfed in the crapper.

The one who suffered most, I think, was my 12-year-old son, who was quite the Somebody down at the MUD games. If you think my mood was black yesterday, you have sen him!

Kevin W. Baker said...

Thanks Grandpa Bob!

I may not remember the days of computation-by-abacus, but my first computer was a C64 with a tape drive, and spent some quality time with a few TRS-80s in elementary school. My first internet access (1993, freshman year of college) was a shitty 2400 dialup account that gave me a hyperterminal connection to some mainframe. It provided a TEXT ONLY WEB BROWSER. Now *that* was weak, because we all know that porn is the WWW's killer app. Who had time to download some giant text file, then uudecode it into a binary...just for a nekkid picture? The answer, of course, is "I did", but thank god those days are past.

But I tend not to boast about this stuff because a) computers sucked ass back then, and I doubt anyone is impressed with my ability to
10 PRINT "PROGRAM IN BASIC"
20 END
RUN
and b)I'm pretending I'm still in my 20s.

But yeah, Neddie, it's positively agonizing to step back to a slower speed. Isn't that funny? A slow connection will give me fits that make my road rage look like diaper rash.

Anonymous said...

Ned, is it possible that some of those Zeros you were carving along with the Ones were what eventually inspired you to put the wheel in wheelbarrow?

Anonymous said...

Sure. Blame the trees. They worship a Tree Sprite and have declared a forest fatwa on all sentient and civilized beings. They hate us because they're jealous that we get to wear Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops while they're stuck with bark. And they've been promised 66 virgin olive oil bushes if they'll martyr themselves for the Sprite.

DDT the lot of them! But do it with a coalition of the milling in a Shock and Saw campaign, so the liberated cablewaves will greet you by dancing in the stream.