grrgoyl

...no more AMC Pacer for me.

It is such a beautiful thing. I'm weeping right now just a little from sheer happiness.

Not to say the installation was a breeze. The poor, poor Nice Lady (Tery's word for "sistah," another word for "fellow lesbian." Okay, no more explaining). But cute as hell in work boots, jeans, tool belt and just a tantalizing hint of what looked like a serious tattoo peeking out from under her shirt on her back when she knelt down (not that I was looking or anything *wink*) I was at first indignant that the installation was going to cost me $50, but watching what she went through I feel I got every penny's worth. It turns out our little condo is full of cable outlets that are useless...wires that are cut, other wires that don't connect to anything, electrical boxes that were a pain to pull out and even harder to put back. Just lots of pretty little outlets that don't actually do anything. Which is exactly what I feared. She asked if I minded if she cut a larger hole in the wall to get the box out. At this point having my heart so deeply set on the success of this endeavor, I gave her carte blanche to do whatever she had to do. She could have torn the whole wall down if she needed to.

She eventually had to drill a whole new hole in the wall and run a whole new cable down the side of the building. The process took much longer than she expected and she was cursing the whole time. I felt bad, but she assured me the jobs where she is able to waltz in and just plug the modem into an outlet and be ready to go are very few and far between. She also got out of breath and sweaty from running up and down 4 flights of stairs, so I gave her a glass of ice water. I wish I could say we brushed fingers and one thing led to another, but she was all business. Poopie.

Once the new cable was run, however, she pulled out her equipment to test the line before the final hook-up. She must have felt bad for having nothing but bad news the entire time, because her reaction was, "Oh Jesus yeah! We got crazy signal!!" She thought I might even have too much signal, if such a thing is possible. She also complimented me on the speed of my computer, as if I had anything whatsoever to do with building it. She relaxed a little as she fixed my settings, and retrieved her water which she had forgotten about. She gulped it down noisily, with that little gasping noise that kids make when they drink something really fast. It was hilarious. She pulled up a diagnostic page and showed me a chart, "You see this little tiny red line?" pointing to a line not even a centimeter long, "That's where you were on your dial-up. Now you see this line here?" She pointed to a line about 4 inches long, "That's where you are now. Not bad, huh?" I had no idea what the lines represented or how accurate they were, but I didn't care. I wanted to lick the screen.

So now I'm acclimatizing to a whole new ISP on Internet Explorer. After 9 years on AOL, I feel like Neo emerging from his pod prison for the first time. My first stop was albinoblacksheep.com to enjoy all the flash files that download instantly instead of some 20 minutes later. I found a fabulous program Comcast offers called EasySwitch that automatically goes into your old ISP account and transfers all the information, stored emails, bookmarked websites and address book into IE for you. I'd have made the switch years ago if I knew it would be this easy. The only thing I'm having a problem with is whenever I try to open my friends page, my computer insists on opening AOL and dialing up to do it, even though I am already online. Annoying, but I'm hoping something that will be cleared up when I finally break the umbilicus and get to delete AOL from my computer forevah.

Now the only question is what to do with all the free time I'll have that's NOT spent watching websites load at the speed of room-temperature tar. Give me all your non-reduced pics, your .gif files and links to content-heavy pages. I can take it!