Friday, 20 February 2009

Once upon a time...

... I had a 384kbps internet connection that didn't have an unlimited quota. Somewhere along the line, the ISP decided to upgrade the connection to 1Mbps for the same price. And it was good, except that their price for unlimited quota still sucks (about US$75/month).

Thus I went and signed up for another ISP (in addition to my existing connection), because sometimes I needed to be online for longer than 50 hours/month... Okay, that's a lie. Not sometimes, always... :) And since it was a wireless connection, I could bring and use it anywhere I want. It's also cheap (by internet rate standards here), at around $10/month ($11 if you include VAT) for unlimited usage, although the speed varies from 64-256kbps (256kbps for the first 2GB of usage). And it was good... At least for the first few months.

Then came along the need to download MySQL Server 5.1, because the old 5.0 version that I had lying around in my hard drive didn't work so well with Mac OS X 10.5.6, which comes to no surprise because it was a 10.4 binary package. Since my usage is well under 2GB, I figured I'd better use my wireless connection, rather then let it go to waste. It's cheaper anyway, and I'm not so much in a hurry to get said database server. And while I'm at it, I'd better download the 10.4 binary too, because some of the systems I work with still use 10.4.9.



WTF? It should run at 256kbps! OK, maybe the server is overloaded, let's try again after a few moments...

A few moments later...


OK, that's much better, but still, I don't have a whole week just to download a database server...

WTF? It just timed out. *Hit retry*...

Timed out again? !@#$%^ *Hit retry again*...

5892379862397 retries later...


It just seems there won't be cheap (quality) internet here in Indonesia at the moment... *Sigh*
(Disconnects wireless connection and turns to broadband cable connection)