Back Again

Here's the deal. I've moved into a nice little three-bedroom house in a little hamlet - yes, a hamlet, the last legally-recognized hamlet in Ontario, so I'm told - out in the middle of nowhere. It's great out here; peaceful, dark, no neighbours to speak of, it's a relatively short drive to work and wherever else I need to go - it's ideal in almost every way.

But moving, lemme tell ya, is a painful process. Setting aside for a moment the remarkable volume of shit that a single person can accumulate over a few short years, the simple act of moving just the computer is in reality a huge hassle. If you're like me, you've built up a lot of computer crap over the years; I've got everything from cables and adapters that serve purposes unknown to motherboards and video cards kicking around here. Keeping it all straight is a nightmare. And once everything is actually transported to the new place, setting it all back up is near-impossible. For me, at least; see, what's happened here is that I got the basic system up and running, and then instead of hooking up all the various peripherals - printers, scanner, webcam, stuff like that - I find myself spending all my time surfing the net and gaming. Hell, I just tonight got my rear speakers hooked up, and I've been here over a week.

The one real problem I'm faced with here - and it's driving me nuts - is the lack of broadband in this area. No DSL, no cable, no nothing. So after two years as a DSL LPB, I find myself back in the world of dial-up. And wowzers, does it suck.

The best thing that can be said about dial-up internet access is that it's better than no access at all. Faint praise indeed, and it's especially true when you've spent a significant amount of time as a broadband user. I remember the day I installed my DSL, and how I swore to every god I could think of that I'd never go back to dialup.

And here I am.

The biggest drawback to dial-up isn't the infuriatingly slow downloads; I could live without that, since I buy all my games (don't believe in warez) and I download such a small amount of music that dial-up works fine for that anyway. And it's not even the fact that my Quake pings have gone from 60-80 to 250+; there is much suckage in that, but I played like that before and I can do it again. What hurts me the most is that I'm suddenly unable to effectively use voice chat programs like Gamevoice or Battlefield Communicator while I play. I can survive with my asstastic ping in Quake, but every last ounce of my bandwidth has to be dedicated to the game in order for me to be effective. So naturally, talking while I play is out of the question.

And believe me, that sort of immediate voice communication takes the game to a whole new level. It's not just the fact that you can tell your clanmates what's going on without having to type furiously while under fire, it's the simple social interaction that such communication allows. I've had some great times talking with my clan buds while we're in a match or hopping around on public servers, and it bothers me a great deal that I won't be able to take part in that anymore. These days, and for quite some time now, I play Quake (and other, similar games, of course) not just for the game itself, but because it gives me the opportunity to hang out with my friends and shoot the shit.

Anyway, enough of my whining. While my current predicament is likely to make me even more of a single-player-only gamer, I continue to hold out hope that someday (someday soon, preferrably) I'll have access to some sort of broadband again. Until that happens, life goes on.

And much like life, the unpacking goes on as well. I keep telling myself that a finite number of boxes means a finite amount of unpacking, but as each day passes it gets harder and harder to believe. So once that little distraction is taken care of, I'll be back with some real articles that might actually be relevant to something. Until then, may I suggest you have a look at this.