Life without DSL

Posted on July 28, 2007 by Dave Bonta

or, How I Spent My Summer Vacation

But as of 12:30 this afternoon, thanks to the intercession of my cousin Jeff and a new modem from Verizon, Plummer’s Hollow has high-speed internet once again.

About Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta (bio) crowd-sources his problems by following his gut, which he shares with one quadrillion of his closest microbial friends --- a tight-knit, symbiotic community comprising some 500 different species of bacteria, fungi, and protozoa.
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18 Responses to Life without DSL

  1. marja-leena says:
    July 28, 2007 at 8:29 pm

    Hehehe! Glad your DSL is back.

  2. Laura says:
    July 28, 2007 at 9:48 pm

    Ah, but you had time to appreciate the bird song!

  3. suzanne says:
    July 28, 2007 at 10:01 pm

    I love that slug!!!
    but I am not coming to fetch him or her or it

    I want to congratulate you
    on how well you kept your cool
    through what was
    I know from experience
    a horrible terrible experience

  4. Harry says:
    July 29, 2007 at 5:11 am

    If you drag the handle back and forth along the bottom of the video, you can make it look like the slug is super-quick.

  5. David Harmon says:
    July 29, 2007 at 7:32 am

    Cool! I’m about to move house (down to Charlottesville, VA) but once I get online from down there, I’ll be happily following your posts again!

  6. Dave says:
    July 29, 2007 at 8:01 am

    Marja-Leena – Me too, as you can imagine. Back to being an addict…

    Laura – Quite right.

    suzanne – Slugs and snails are hermaphrodites, so “s/he,” I guess.

    Harry – Good tip! I’ve always loved time-lapse photography.

    David – Good luck on your move.

  7. Peter says:
    July 29, 2007 at 8:18 am

    This post comes exactly forty days after you let us know you lost your DSL connection. (Forty days if, Bible-like, you count the starting point as a day.) That’s a long, slow fast.

  8. Lorianne says:
    July 29, 2007 at 10:32 am

    Welcome back to this century, dude.

  10. robin andrea says:
    July 29, 2007 at 12:32 pm

    Yay! You have your high speed connection back. Welcome to the world where a ten second wait is the height of anguish.

  11. Joan says:
    July 29, 2007 at 7:47 pm

    I can’t help but feel the snail video is a visual metaphore for dial-up connections. Glad to have you back in hyperwarp again, though, although the only one to suffer was you, since your posts were still lovely and we still got to see them all along.

  12. Dave says:
    July 29, 2007 at 8:19 pm

    Peter – It was really 40 days? That’s scary.

    Lorianne – Thanks.

    robin andrea – Yeah, but it’ll probably take a while for the feeling to wear off that this high-speed thing is too good to be true.

    Joan – Thanks. But only with high-speed can I upload stunning videos like this one.

  13. Dick says:
    July 30, 2007 at 3:17 am

    As good as a poem, Dave. Actually, I found the clip deeply relaxing – like listening to Brian Eno!

  14. rr says:
    July 30, 2007 at 6:20 am

    What a fantastic way to announce your return to, uh, I nearly send the real world. Let’s say life in the fast lane. That has to be the best soundtrack ever. And that slug looks very like one I saw yesterday. Perhaps they are related.

  15. mb says:
    July 30, 2007 at 1:00 pm

    The slight irregularities of the camera movement made me suddenly think about your breathing, heart beating. Beautiful sounds, too.

    Think of the silvery trail you must have left this summer.

  16. Dave says:
    July 30, 2007 at 5:01 pm

    Dick – That’s cool. I wasn’t prepared for anyone to actually like the clip, other than me, so I’m kind of surprised at the reception here.

    rr – Yes, that was a bit of serendipity, I’d say (though I shot the movie over a month ago). Now if you wrote a poem about the fast lane today, that would be downright spooky.

    mb – Glad you liked the shaking. A made a second short movie of that slug with the tripod, but it wasn’t quite as compelling, for some reason.

    Slug and snail locomotion always makes me think of a very low-flying magic carpet.

  17. Karen says:
    August 1, 2007 at 12:06 am

    I didn’t realize there was a video here until I clicked over… dang bloglines.

    I can’t get over how different your birds sound compared to ours. Your yellowthroat has a yankee accent I think. :) And there are a few in there I don’t recognize at all. That loudest one, with the three same-tone notes, what is that?

  18. Dave says:
    August 3, 2007 at 9:58 am

    Karen – Yeah, it didn’t come through in the emailed version, either. I’m going to have to start adding a note for subscribers when I post a video (there’s a technical fix, I think, but I’m too lazy to explore it, for as often as I post videos).

    I’m not sure what that loudest bird is, to be honest. The microphone in my camera is pretty lousy, giving everything a tinny sound. I’ll get my mom to listen to it and get back to you.