I have not had my broadband cable connection to the Net for days now. I think that some construction digging in my area damaged an underground fiberoptic line, so nothing is coming through until my provider, or whoever is responsible for the underground network, finds the problem and fixes it. I will be visited by a cable technician this Sunday to try to find the problem, but it may not lie with my own studio equipment at all. We will see.

Meanwhile I connect briefly to the Wider World through an "archaic" and very slow dial-up connection through my not-so-archaic laptop. This is why I still pay money to a dial-up provider, just for situations like this, as well as when I'm on the road. It delivers my e-mail and allows me to put up this brief Weblog entry, but cannot do music or any kind of byte-heavy graphics.

When I reported my problem to the cable provider I actually talked to a real person. It was well after midnight so nothing much was going on, and I had a short conversation with him. He wasn't even in India; he was somewhere in the USA. He said that many customers, when the cable goes off, freak out. Unlike me, they don't have an alternative connection. They are all bound up in their broadband. So their only connection is lost and they are suddenly plunged back into the twentieth century. (Believe it or not, that was only five years ago.) They might actually have to call someone on the phone. Or even weirder, write or have printed some marks on a piece of pressed fiber, which is then placed in a folded piece of similar pressed fiber, brought to a place where one pays a small amount to have this marked fiber package sent to another location… I forget what this process was called.

I'm not freaking out. I connect briefly for utilitarian purposes, and then spend the time I would have spent pointlessly websurfing…pointlessly doing something else, like reading old magazines or looking through catalogs of stuff I can't afford. If I were truly devoted, I'd be spending that time studying physics. But I'm not. I do attend to it; I'm currently pondering the difference between acceleration, momentum, and impulse. I'm not freaking out at all. Really. Only two days until the cable guy shows up. Maybe it will be fixed by then anyway. I wait for those little green lights on the modem to go on. They're not on yet. I try to connect anyway. Page not found. No, I'm not anxious at all.

Posted at 2:21 am | link