rips…

seasonal greetings on hold, again!

It is the season for “Silent Night, Holy Night” and “Winter Wonderland”. Here in Mandal, Norway it is anything but as the year of 2012 is nearing its end.

I am trying to get something done on‐line here, but once every hour or so I am literally put on hold for 15 minutes or so. And often the connection is open for less than a minute before I am put on hold again. It is such a  fun game!

Impressive speed, isn't it? 14Byte/sec – waiting more than 18 minutes for a 16KB web page to show up.

No, the connection isn't down. Everything is just slowing down to a crawl ever so often simply because the capacity is too low to serve all paying customers. We are all paying for something we rarely ever get.

“Local distance” makes no sense here, as despite the fact that I am located in Norway my “on‐line location” is somewhere in Germany.

And, officially this is called “broadband” in this country of mine. Anyone wondering why we are building our own internet connection in our area?

Yes, we will get there eventually, but in the mean time I have plenty of time left over for contemplating the advantages of using good old mail pigeons to communicate across the backwaters I am living in. The older the better…

Smoke signals might be even more efficient – especially for those of us who are smokers already. Can't do anything but smoke anyway while waiting for our wonderful “14Byte/sec broadband” to speed up to around 2KiloByte/sec again for maybe half an hour or so.

in the mood…

“'tis the season to be jolly”, but I honestly can't see the point. Never could for that matter because of all the nonsense the season is overflooded with, but that's another matter entirely.

Now I just want to occupy my time with doing something useful, but I can't while constantly being put on hold. So all that's left to do is writing this seasonal comment, and hope there will be an opening so I can get it on‐line before it's outdated.

Seasonal greetings everyone everywhere, from all us here on the farm!

sincerely 
farm assistant

Hageland 14.dec.2012
last rev: 14.dec.2012