High Speed, Baby

The guy from Dish Network came out today and installed the dish for our high speed Internet access. It's now working, and it's amazing.

So we now have 2 satellite dishes in our yard, thankfully on the edge near a big oak, so they don't stick out like sore thumbs. Eh, who am I kiddin'? I wouldn't care anyway. High speed, baby!

We also have almost 150 feet of new cable underground, barely underground, that is... and a new hole in our floor so said cable can come upstairs from the basement. It was a long installation, from around 10am until about 3:30pm.

The things us country hicks have to go through for high speed 'net. Finally. Just in time for NaBloPoMo. Now to get a router so Sammy can use it upstairs on his computer. Which is my old computer, because I'm now using Joycie's old computer that's fixed and like a brand spanking new machine.

I decided that I would get the new machine instead of putting it in Sam's room, and Sammy could use my "old" computer, the one that he already has all littered with AOL crap. I'm not a big fan of AOL. For some reason, ever since he installed it on "his desktop" on my computer, when I'm on my desktop, AOL is constantly trying to connect. It would drive me batty. AOL puts hooks in all over, and it took me a long time to figure out how to make it not launch every time I logged on. Grrr...

So we moved that computer up to his room this weekend, and he's up there on it right now, still using the old, slow dial-up access, with his music playing way too loud. Again.

I also finally got our external hard drive hooked up & running; it's a FreeAgent Pro I bought at Best Buy at a great sale price earlier this summer. All of our family photo files are on the hard drive now in Sammy's room, so I spent Saturday evening copying them onto the FreeAgent drive and then Sunday copying them onto my new machine. I didn't have it on a high speed USB port, because, um..., I don't know that I have one of those, but anyway, it took about 5 hours to copy those photo files from the FreeAgent to my hard drive... 5 hours! I don't do the old-fashioned photo albums anymore; ours are all on our computer. It's very handy, and I honestly think we look at the photos more with them being on the computer than in a book. Since the computer is in the dining room, and since I now have a big 19" flat screen monitor, sometimes we'll get a slideshow going of a photo album and enjoy it during dinner. I know I take a lot of photos, and I would hate to lose them. Now I'm feeling much better about those files... I have a backup and a backup copy of the backup. This adorable little FreeAgent drive is handy to move between our computers, so it'll be easy to keep all the copies up-to-date.

Hello, 21st Century, it's so nice to meet ya!