Oh, the Man Is Coming

The man is coming at six o'clock
The man is coming at six o'clock
The man is coming at six o'clock
To survey my house for BROADBAND

He'll be riding six white horses
Oh, we'll all go out to meet him
We will kill the old red rooster
We'll all have chicken n' dumplin's
We'll all be shoutin' "Halleluja"

I will blog from my BED
I will blog in the HEAD
I will blog wearing RED
I will blog till I'm DEAD

Sittin' out there on the screen porch, feet up, sippin' a morning julep and scanning the Sunday headlines, Hey, Wondie! The Harridans have a new long-player out that the Post is comparing favorably to Rotten in Denmark! Let's down that corksoaker on this handy wi-fi Mac laptop -- I'll beam it to the family Victrola! Why look, some of our other broadband-sporting friends have sent us a frisky video that we should eyeball right this minute -- why it's only 250 MB, we'll have it in no time! While that's chugging, I'll simultaneously call up all 15 of my favorite news outlets in separate tabs while doing an RSS search for all blogs containing my name, finish a round of Shadows of Isildur, and -- oh yeah, I owe Larry and the boys a guitar solo, I'll just Dropload the uncompressed .AIF file to 'em, doot-de-doo...

Christ. You just don't know what torture this 28.8 stuff has been for the last year.

Here's the thing, boiled down to its essence:

You're afraid to click on things.

That's it. That's the crux of the biscuit. With this Jurassic dialup connection, every link that everybody sends you is immediately suspect of being something that's gonna choke the line for the next half-hour. You really, really have to want that content on the other end of that hyperlink, you have to be willing to commit to it, because if the link is to anything other than a bare-bones text-based, well-optimized HTML page, your wait is going to be anything from two to five minutes. And just forget streamed audio. Video? It is to laugh. Want to send a graphic to the server you keep your blog on? Oh, be prepared to wait ten minutes, during which if you initiate any kind of TCP activity, you will double the duration of not ony your upload but whatever you initiated as well.

This is close to the Chinese Water Torture.

But...

Sing it with me now...

The man is coming at six o'clock....