Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 23 February 2001, 5:21 PM
Rupert Goodwins' diary
Tuesday
20/02/2001
Today, a new era dawns at my Holloway Road pied-a-terre. Once upon a time, you see, I was on BT's ADSL trial. Then they took it away, and I didn't fancy going through the various hoops to get it back again. But you can't go back to dial-up having had always-on broadband, so last year I decided to get a cable modem from my local suppliers, Telewest.
The full story of what happened has yet to be written, but it wasn't pretty. I nearly went back to BT, after the December installation went wrong and nobody seemed to be able to come up with a new date. But following some sterling work by the PR department I was given the 20th Feb.
And now it's come, and so's the chatty, personable installer who gets into a deep conversation with Goodwins Minor about American wrestling while I stand helplessly by. Apart from a couple of minor mishaps ("It doesn't seem as if you've been provisioned... oh, perhaps I should plug in the cable") the whole thing goes sweetly. Shortly afterwards, so does he, leaving me and Goodwins Minor staring in awe at a computer that now has half a megabit of Internet loveliness permanently plumbed in.
There is a pause of precisely one and a half seconds before we engage in a pitched battle to see Who Goes First, fists and feet protruding from a circular dustcloud a la Loony Tunes.
I go first. I'm the daddy. After half an hour, I graciously deign to enable the wireless networking stuff I pre-installed so he can use the laptop to gnaw at the scraps of bandwidth that fall from the king's groaning table. He falls silent, engrossed in boasting to his Quake clan pals on mIRC that he's got a tiny ping.
Our conclusion at the end of the day? Four thumbs up.
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