I’ve largely finished moving out of the house in Montpelier, with my belongings (and myself) moving down to my parents’ house for the time being. This really isn’t that bad, as I get along with my parents rather well, and we’re all aware that it will be temporary, which takes a lot of the stress off (though it still remains to be seen exactly how temporary). The one major flaw with living there is that they have no broadband, and even their dialup is noisy and slow. This is through no fault of their own: they’ve kept their hardware up to date and internal lines clear. It all comes down to the fact that the phone company isn’t willing to lay new cable, nor add a station to a pre-existing box to add DSL capability further out of town. Also, the cable company continues to give a song and dance about “maybe” running cable out there “soon” (which is what they’ve been saying for 20 years), so that’s out as an option. There is wireless broadband in the area, but there are a few hills in the way of the line-of-sight needed to get there. Cellular based broadband (EVDO and the like) MAY work, assuming that our somewhat sketchy reception at the house is enough and that the towers serving it are upgraded to handle it… awful big investment for something that may not work. Basically, the choices are either pay an exorbitant amount of me getting a T1 or partial T1 installed, move, or suck it up on the 56k dialup service that is consistently lucky to hit 28.8 (which is “high enough” according to the letter of the law that the phone company will do nothing about the line noise, since it’s not seriously affecting voice communication).

So, instead I’m sitting in my car, in Hanover, listening to my iPod on my car stereo, getting some writing done and downloading a few updates and apps I wanted/needed for some projects. Normally I would be sitting out in front of Collis, but it’s too cold and rainy. Otherwise, I’d be sitting inside the Hopkins Center and using the wireless there, but that’s closed up tight for Labor Day weekend (as is the interior of Collis). But hey, my car is pretty comfy, and it’s nice being able to listen to my own music.

Tomorrow, I pack up my bags and head south to Rhode Island, where Erica and her friends are gearing up for the new school year, and planning a big camping trip up in Maine, which I will be accompanying them on. (And yes, I do consider them my friends too, but I know them through Erica and they were her friends first, so…) It should be a good time rain or shine, and it will be nice to see them all again (many of whom I haven’t seen since the spring). One of my secret projects should be coming up tomorrow as well, so hopefully I’ll have time to post about that once it’s done.

Y’know, modular apps is kind of neat in that when you update an application, you just drop the new application into the directory and it replaces the old one. That said, I do kind of miss when an updater actually modified the pre-existing app. They were smaller. I’m most of the way through an 80mb download, and that is frankly a small package compared to some. it gets frustrating killing time waiting for things to download (hey, news to companies out there: not all of us have an OC3 pipe!). But then, when else would we write all our blog posts?