Dial-Up Dilemma

Thanks to the end of Ramadan, which our Muslim brothers and sisters celebrate (for those who aren’t in the know), my wife and daughter and I had a chance to visit the old folks in San Pedro, Laguna for a couple of days. My balikbayan tito and tita are also staying in my parents house whiling away the final days of their vacation before they catch their plane back tomorrow evening to the US which they have permanently called home. So, it’s a reunion of sorts with a cousin, twice removed, also coming over tomorrow to help in the hustle and bustle of the balikbayan departure.

While my elders are out to watch Regine Velasquez stretch her vocal chords at the PICC (thanks in part to my mother’s closeness with Unilab reps), my little family and I have been left at home to fend for ourselves. After tucking our baby to sleep, Elvie also decided to proceed with snoozing.

On the other hand, with my new laptop (new as in newly-given to me, a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 which came out late 2006) I decided to connect to cyberspace.

After tinkering with a 2005 ISP card and failing to catch a connection (probably the card is already expired), I pulled out the internet card I just bought from our suking tindahan earlier this evening and proceeded to setup the connection.

After over a dozen busy signals, I finally managed to connect to the internet via dial-up mode, usurping the telephone line from its usual plug in the phone unit and proceeded to voyage in cyberspace … in 50kbps.

I suddenly missed my internet connection at the Makati apartment which was either a 12Mbps or a 100Mbps (depends on which modem was faster – the internal D-Link one, or the Motorola external one). And I definitely miss the office internet which was, even when the Taiwan quake affected internet connections all across Asia, is faster than what I am using now, at this instant, at 10:44PM.

In the early years of the internet here in the Philippines, dial-up at 50Kbps was already considered luxury. Nowadays, with the advent of broadband connections with their ultra-powerful gigabytes per second capabilities (and of course, for the masa, your choice of broadband connection speeds of 512kbps or if your budget can be stretched, a whopping 1mbps). Thus, this makes what I’m doing right now, err, pathetic.

Heck, I’ve tried installing Yahoo Messenger (with the intent of catching either or both my sisters online and having my parents chat with them) and it’s already an hour since I downloaded the YM software and it’s still downloading.

That makes my intent to connect to our office via remote VPN connection an even harder probability, more like an impossible dream of sorts.

Hay … I better not forget to have PLDT DSL installed here in Laguna before my sister arrives later this year. She has demanded that I make sure this is done as she aims to come home with her laptop in tow (she will leave her laptop to my parents and buy a new one in Dubai, so she says) and hopes to be able to connected via email and messenger during her one month vacation.

Well, this is better than not being connected at all. Hmmm, nine hours of internet time left :)