Blessed by the Potato

I’ve used dial-up before, not just in the distant depths of the 90’s, but also while on the road in many recent years; in Ottawa, Penetang, etc. I’ve even used it when Rogers went down and I couldn’t wait for the high speed to come back up. Dial-up is slow, I get that, but it’s being impossibly slow right now on PEI here. I’m clicking a link over here, and walking away for a half hour or so while I wait for it to load, and often even then it hasn’t finished loading.

I’m pretty sure it’s some kind of line quality issue — even just on the phone it sounds pretty buzzy and staticy, and it’s nearly a kilometer of pretty old copper just to the road from here, let alone to Bell’s modems. It’s still really damned annoying with all the “can’t find server” errors and incredibly slow loading issues.

Compounding the problem is the fact that my computer keeps locking up at random, and I have to reset and reload everything. I find that curious — Firefox thankfully has a “restore session” option so that after a crash I don’t have to remember what I had open, it will just reload it all. However, it goes and loads it from the server again, rather than pulling up the cache. Why isn’t the cache doing its job here?

I know I should probably take it as a sign to ignore the interweb and get back to enjoying my vacation, but damnit, the stock market’s crazy these days and I don’t trust it unsupervised!