Hopefully the impact of this node won't make a dent on the E2 servers. Although, it would be understandable if sheer momentum carried this node well passed the day logs and into another, completely unrelated node. Today was the end result of years of dawdling.
For three long years my beliefs have been wedged apart by this continuing question. One that has slowly taken over my life due to the inner turmoil which it presents. The question is fascinating because so many quantifiable variables can be considered while evaluating it. The cost, the monetary value of time lost, the time spend, the negative and positive effect its availability will have on my life. All of these variables were carefully considered before I finally caved in and answered yes to the question that surely haunts millions of others every day:
“Should I get broadband Internet?”
I know, I know, it’s a difficult question to ask. Friends and colleagues have unsuccessfully tried to salvage my sanity by telling me to leave the issue along, but I couldn’t. For three years my parents have asked me if it was a worthy investment, and for those three years I’ve said with ease that it isn’t. There is no justification to pay $43.95 per month simply to send email faster. The premise is nearly a contradiction, since an email message is such a negligible size. In reality I wasn’t sufficiently considering the unwieldy nature of using Hotmail, as well as the fact that I was only at home three months in the year, spending the rest at my University’s T3. My thought process was selfish but reasonable. They didn’t use the Internet and merely asked because everyone else seemed to be jumping on the bandwagon.
This morning I woke up and was no longer able to reasonable dispel the notion that $43.95 was simply too much for something as menial as an Information Superhighway. Today that was no longer true. I’m not sure if that had to do with the fact that the past few days have been an exercise in patience because I've had to download driver files (Possibly my next issue to ponder. How merely wanting a 40 kb driver has turned into an ordeal of searching through a graphic intensive website, only to realize the driver is located within a 10 mb setup, installation, and documentation file), or if it had to do with the sudden realization that I wasn’t going to college this September.
There is no high-speed access in my definite future, leaving me to wonder what I was waiting for. The time will eventually come, why not now? It happened and it’s an absolute godsend, although I do feel a bit cheated. While my connection is not exponentially greater than my U.S. Robotics fax/modem could ever handle, I sit here mulling over what my next step should be. All this bandwidth but with nothing to download. There’s a distinct possibility that I’ll resort to simply viewing the large movie trailers online, instead of those incorrectly labeled “small” when they actually meant, “you’ll hear it but won’t see crap.” I’m torn. On one hand I’m convinced of its utility, but have been inable to realize its potential day. This new connection speed won’t decrease the amount of time spent on net at all; it will merely increase the amount of crap that is seen.
Well, I must move on. I’ve completed this node in the same amount of time that it would have taken prior to spending $43.95. I’m off to download large, arbitrary files simply because it’s possible. Hopefully some gold or significance will be found in the rubble. Farewell my fellow cable modemers. I’ll see you tomorrow - same time, same place, faster browsing speed.