when the internet connection at the office is dead, it’s a tough day in the life of a web developer. i mean, how can you develop the web when you can’t get to it? *sigh*

there are sneaky ways to do it, though. my blackberry will let me access the web at excruciatingly slow transfer speeds. and when i say slow, i mean like, it takes 3 minutes to load up yahoo’s main page. we’re talking 2400 baud modem speeds here, folks. and if you don’t know what 2400 baud is, consider yourself lucky.

remember the days when you would only browse one page at a time? you would only have one browser window open at a time and you would have to wait for pages to load? and i mean wait like 30 seconds to a minute wait. yeah, those days. slow..internet…bad.

well, the office internet connection is dead. it has been reported that our upstream provider has a nationwide break in their service. nationwide! and the ETA for service to go back up is over 24 hours!! this isn’t the first time that something like this has happened and it has basically shut down the office.

shut it down.

so the few of us who are still in the office are taking care of administrative things and the like. as soon as i’m done with that, i think that i’m going to go home and bake some cookies. yeah, that sounds like a good idea. i also found out why my cookies turned out so flat the other day, so i’m going to try to see if i can fix the problem in the next batch. i bought 4 boxes of butter from costco and i’m almost done with it. it’s all the baking that i’ve been doing.

life without internet is kind of weird. empty, really. especially for a web developer. anyhow, i’m actually trying to sneak onto the internet through my blackberry, but the connectivity is so slow that it hurts. usually browsing the web is tolerable with it, but i’m only getting about 3kB/s transfers. 3kB. i mean, even slow dial up modems deliver more than that. we’re talking accessing the internet circa 1992 here with 2400 baud modems. props to anyone who remembers those days.

so i’m trying to browse the web, but it just isn’t happening. here, let me open up a web browser, try and surf the web, and see how much i can type in that time.

a long time ago i tried to open a web browser to yahoo. yahoo usually is a pretty fast web page to open, but it turns out that their portal has really become bloatware. really bloated. it’s still loading. i’m serious. i kid you not. i type fast, but not that fast. the yahoo logo hasn’t even loaded yet. oh there it is. almost done. really, i think so. news story image is loading now. there’s still the advertisement image that needs to load. man, i don’t even know what i’m going to do with myself after the page is done loading, i’ll be a few years older, you know? speaking of being a few years older a friend was lamenting to me about how he is getting old. i told him that he shouldn’t really lament because he’s always been older than me. that didn’t seem to bring him much comfort. the page is still loading. i wish i was kidding. let’s see, ok, i think it’s getting close to being done now. yup, it’s done riiiiiiight now. seriously…slow. it’s awful.

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ok, it turns out that the internet was only down for about 5 hours. and just as i was wrapping up to leave the office and work from home, it came back up. rats.