Against the clock

I've just been through a most harrowing experience.

Earlier this evening I tried to buy some Dave Matthews tickets online, and to begin with everything went smoothly. The band are playing in Saratoga Springs on Melanie's birthday this summer, and happily there were some tickets left so I went ahead with the booking process and eventually reached the 'sign in' page.

At this stage I had to enter my email address and create a new password or, if I had an existing Ticketmaster account, I should enter my previous password. Oh, and I had two minutes to complete this page or else the tickets would be gone! A large red countdown clock appeared in the bottom right hand corner of the screen and suddenly I was Jack Bauer in an episode of 24.

OK. Don't panic.

Enter name....check.
Enter email address....check.
Confirm email address...check.

Thirty seconds gone.

Enter password....quick, think of something....check.
Confirm password...check.
Do I want to receive details of other upcoming events in Saratoga....hell no.

One minute gone.

Click on 'confirm'....an account already exists in this name; please re-enter correct password or create a new account.

Nooooooooooo!

Forty five seconds left.

When did I buy tickets on this site before? What could my password have been? No time to look it up. Sweat starting to drip onto the keyboard. Just keep calm, you can do it.

First attempt...no good. Second attempt...no good. Fifteen seconds to go. Time for one more try...

Five seconds, four seconds, three seconds, two...

SUCCESS!!!!!

Jack Bauer saves the world again! Just let the next page load now and I can complete the deal and get out of here. But what's this? Your session has expired; please click on the 'back' button to restart the booking process. Northern internet delay had cost me the tickets - it's a good job Jack doesn't have to rely on Tamaani.

We now have seats in row 318.

The Englishman who went up a hill but came down a mountain

After a week when I've hardly been able to get online - problems with my laptop and router rather than Tamaani on this occasion - everything seems to have magically corrected itself today, so I can at last fill you in on my activities over the last few days.

My back is much better now, but I've saved some of the pills they gave me at the nursing station just in case I suffer I relapse, which is a distinct possibility at my time of life; Sophie next door put my age at 34 when we initially met though, so I think I'll let her be the judge of chronological matters from now on.

Given my relative sprightliness I finally decided to tackle the mountain that lies to the west yesterday, and armed with sandwiches and flask I set off on what was one of the most adventuresome things I've done for some time. OK, it was hardly Man Against Wild, Bear Grylls-style survival, but it was a challenge nonetheless, and I felt a great sense of achievement upon reaching the summit. Parts of the climb were quite steep and I must admit that I had to take a few breathers on the way up, but the effort was well worth it in the end.

(click to enlarge)

Whether the edifice that I climbed is actually a mountain or nothing more than a very steep hill I really can't say with 100% certainty, but at approximately 1100 feet it certainly meets some people's requirements for mountain status so it's a mountain for me and besides, mountain climbing sounds far more rugged than hill walking. On more than one occasion it looked as though I'd reached the final peak, only for a whole new climb to appear once I'd made what I thought to be the top, and for a brief moment I was able to get a little inkling as to how the survivors of the plane that crashed in the Andes back in the early 70s must have felt, only without the need to resort to cannibalism.

Speaking of strange meat I'm currently defrosting a slab of something that I got from the community freezer earlier in the term; I've no idea what it is - could be caribou, could be whale - but I'm going to eat it tonight and I'm determined to enjoy it no matter what. I think I deserve it after my expedition!

Pigeon post

On more than one occasion I have bemoaned the (lack of) speed of the internet connection that we get up here, but a story from South Africa this week made me think that perhaps things aren't actually too bad after all. A company in Durban, disgruntled with its ISP's download speeds, attached a 4GB memory stick to a carrier pigeon and got the bird to fly 60 miles to its other office building; whilst Winston (for that was the pigeon's name) was flying, the same 4GB of data was uploaded to the other office via the internet.

Winston took just over an hour to fly the 60 miles, and it then took a further hour to download the data from the memory stick, giving a total time of around two hours to deliver the data. During that two hours, guess how much of the data had been sent via the internet?

Just 4%.

So, maybe I shouldn't be so critical of Tamaani after all. I guess on the days that things get really slow we could follow the South African example, but as there are no pigeons up here I suppose we'd have to use geese instead. However, they'd probably get shot and eaten before they could deliver the goods, so maybe it's not such a good idea after all.

Brings a whole new meaning to the term 'mega-bite.'

Grinding to a halt

It's been a frustrating (but swine flu free) week.

Our internet connection has been doing its best impression of the stock market over the last ten days or so -it's been down more than it's been up - but at least the connection we have here at school at seems to be working today. One problem has been the fact that there has been a big update for Windows issued recently (around 300MB), and whilst that is water of a duck's back for those of you in the South, for us here it can clog the system faster than a Big Mac can clog your arteries if everybody has 'automatic updates' switched to on.

I think I will be returning my modem to Tamaani shortly as I don't want to pay for the whole of May when I'm only here for another week, so postings may continue to be intermittent, but I shall do my best to occupy my students so that I can maximise my time online during school hours (hope my employers aren't reading this!).

Speaking of leaving (which we sort of were in the last paragraph), I will be on my flight home this time next week, so the next seven days involve packing boxes, tying up loose ends and preparing for our graduation ceremony, which is next Thursday. At the time of writing, I have no idea whether I'll be returning here next year; it looks like my course might be moved to Kangirsujuaq, an even more Northern town, but nothing has been confirmed yet. When I have news I'll pass it on to you, but don't hold your breath!

If you do hold your breath though, at least you won't catch swine flu. You'll die of hypoxia, but the swine flu won't get you.

CNN would be proud.

The heat is on

Things are hotting up here at the moment, both literally and metaphorically. The temperature climbed to +1° yesterday, which felt almost tropical when you apply the Law of Relativity (that's my Law of Relativity, not the other guy's). I was able to walk to school with coat unzipped and my stride was most certainly on the jaunty side of normal; temperatures are set to drop over the remainder of the week, but at least for now it feels like spring is most certainly here and summer is on its way.

However, to offset the good weather, problems with the internet have most certainly been making most of us decidedly hot under the collar over the past few days. We are now entering a fourth day without any service at home, and I'm writing this using the connection at school, which thankfully is separate from the one that serves the town. It's at times like these that I realise just how much I rely on the net for information, entertainment and communication, especially in my relative isolation here, and one can only hope that we will be reconnected soon. It does mean that I can't possibly pay any of my bills online at the moment though, so every cloud does indeed have its silver lining!

Tamaani talks

It's always easy to be critical, far more difficult to be complementary; as Alexander Pope so poetically put it, 'to err is human; to forgive, divine.'

With this in mind, I'd like to draw your attention, dear reader, to the comment left by Alain Lance in reference to my post 'Connection interrupted.' It would seem that progress is being made regarding our internet connection up here, so I would like to complement the powers that be for their efforts and I will keep you informed as to any further news. Maybe this is a victory for the power of blogging...?

There's not a lot going on...

I feel like I've been living in an episode of Corner Gas this week, and whilst this is a reference that will leave all non-Canucks completely nonplussed, those of you who abide in Canada will know exactly what I mean. There's really not been a lot going on, and the week's trickled by like tomato sauce out of a bottle that's been in the fridge for too long. Not one of the modern, squeezy plastic bottles, but a good old-fashioned glass one, the type where you had to slap the bottom really hard to get anything out at all.

School has been slow, Shatner-Net has been slow even by its own slow standards, and the Board have been slow to pay me. In fact, they didn't pay me at all; apparently I didn't officially exist until yesterday, but I've been assured that as I am now real, I will receive some remuneration for my efforts. Probably.

Connection Interrupted

"The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again."

The above phrase is rapidly becoming a mantra that I could do without having to read on a daily basis. I have now acquired a modem from Tamaani, the ISP here, but I think my re-christening of the service as 'Shatner-net' was premature. At...least...Bill...finishes...his...sentences. Getting online with Tamaani, at least at a reasonable hour, is next to impossible at the moment.

The problem is that the satellite signal that provides the internet connection has to be 'split' amongst all the users in town; the more people online at the same time, the further that signal has to be split up. Consequently, at peak times when everyone is online, the system simply grinds to a halt. Now, I realise that we are fortunate to have internet at all up here and yes, I fully appreciate the irony of using a blog to complain about my connection, but you would think that if we have the capability of faking a moon landing we would be able to provide a usable internet service in the North.

We have to pay a minimum of $70 a month for a service that is slow at the best of times, but at the moment that service is not fit for purpose. The number of users has now outstripped the available bandwidth, so Tamaani either needs to lower its prices or to invest its profits into improving the service. Problem is that Tamaani hold a monopoly in the North, so one wonders whether the incentive is there.

Finally, back to the modems themselves. For those of you unfamiliar with them, they look like the black monolith from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, but on a vastly smaller scale (like Spinal Tap's Stonehenge). Now, whilst I was still in Kingston I visited the Bell outlet in the mall to see if they sold such modems and whether they would be compatible with Tamaani's service. The guy I spoke to didn't really know what type of modem I meant, so I used the 2001 description.

"2001? Never heard of it," was his reply.

I gave up.

Casting the net

Sunday 7^th September

I am now online, sort of, thanks to someone else's wireless network which is unsecured and cunningly named 'wireless'. The connection is of Shatneresque quality (see my first post), but I have been able to send and receive a few emails and catch up with the outside world. Andy Murray has made it to the US Open final, Lewis Hamilton has won a thrilling Grand Prix only to be demoted to third and England have snuck past the mighty Andorra by a couple of goals. Oh, and Stephen Harper has called a snap election for October, which should serve as the B-Movie to the one in the US in November (although as this is Canada, perhaps that ought to be an 'Eh-Movie'). I haven't missed much, then.

Still no cargo, so had to hand wash smalls and socks. It's a rock 'n' roll lifestyle up here.

Went down to the river with Dominick and Celine this afternoon, and enjoyed a fine couple of hours fishing, skimming stones and eating berries which Celine assured me weren't poisonous. If my blog entries end abruptly in the next day or so, I will know that she was wrong. The landscape by the river is truly beautiful, a fact that one forgets once the snow has come.

No fish were harmed during the writing of this post.

And so it begins...

Wednesday 3^rd September

Well, with all the decision making ability of Brett Favre I'm back in the North again, and after three years I thought it was about time I recorded my thoughts on paper, or the virtual paper of this blog at least. The regularity of updates will depend very much on the reliability of the internet which, at the moment, seems to be at its lowest in the time I've been here. I think rather than Tamaani, the service needs to be re-christened 'Shatner net' as downloading...even the...smallest file...is time consuming...and disjointed, much in the way that every word that comes out of dear Bill Shatner's mouth seems like...its...very...own...sentence.

So, it is with great anticipation that I await the arrival of both my cargo and my students as I cannot really function up here without either, although at this stage I would hesitate to place any bet on which might appear first. Maybe my next post will bring more news!