The Slow

I hereby christen this horrible ordeal we’re going through as “The Slow”. And oh, for some visuals, here’s the only map of the cables I could find across our section of the world, stolen from awsj.com. And since I am a Spanish speaking God, I will translate it for you.

 
It says “Oh my God, the cables around this area have been severed, leaving the poor, unimportant z-rated bloggers around that area of the world cut off. But really, who cares? They don’t know half of what they’re talking about anyway. And besides, it makes the Internet just a little bit faster for the rest of us. Whoopee!!

No, it doesn’t say that. I just wrote the first things I would say if I were in an area outside of where those cables affect. And of course if I don’t speak Spanish, so don’t even ask me what it means. A fat lot of good those Spanish units back in school have brought me.

So anyway, here are a few things I noticed re “The Slow”. I am blogging this because, well hell there isn’t much else work to do anyway, since The Slow is upon us.

  • Anytime I download anything that has multiple ftp mirrors, I wonder where is the best area to download from. Now, because of maps such as above, I know that neighboring countries are best. Of these, HK, Sing and Taiwan usually have mirrors of things from Sourceforge.net. I dunno why there isn’t one in the Philippines except one I saw going to SkyiNet once. Anyway let’s not go there.

    Ok end of good thing I found out. Here’s the rest.
  • The other day, I woke up at 6am to find the Internet blazingly fast. In an amazing 3 hours of glorious, glorious speed, I updated (almost) all my blogs to WordPress 2.0.6, fixed this, and uploaded / downloaded that. However, once the clock struck 9 or 10-ish, The Slow came once again.
  • However, my client with a corporate account maintains reasonably acceptable speeds. This basically means the obvious, PLDT is routing traffic to their higher – paying customers, regardless of the fact that hey, I am a customer too.

At this point, one would expect me to once again perform that time – honored Filipino tradition that is to bash PLDT. But you know what? No I won’t, because it’s just too tiring and ultimately, useless. I can call them, they can call me, we can call, text, sms, fax, email and telepathize hate – hate and love – love feelings toward each other, and by golly, The Slow would still be there. And believe me, I am not one of those writers who like to bash PLDT. In fact, I once wrote (I dont know where it is but I’m sure its somewhere around), that I am a fan of theirs, since both DSL accounts I signed up for back in Mandaluyong and now in Cainta were very reliable and fast.

And you know what? It looks like its gonna take even longer. I wrote once that it’ll last till Feb. The guys in charge have since said it’ll last till end of Jan, but with comments like “..the rest of the repairs would be completed by the middle of February, if weather permits.”, well, I dunno about you, but ‘if weather permits’ sounds a lot to me like ‘don’t hold your breath’.

And what’s with Inquirer.net’s silence about it all? I dont wanna take a screenshot, but the tech page right this very moment is completely silent about the whole deal. I want detailed, up to the minute reports, gentlemen. I want a guy there, standing on the deck of one or two of those repair ships, with a camera crew and a sat connection, reporting every foot of that cable getting dredged up, patched, and sunk down again. I want another news crew at the factory of where those cables are made, showing them getting ordered, pulling them out of inventory, onto a truck and onto the docks. I want a 24 hour cam on the guy in charge of it all, with his terror stricken face plastered on my tv mouthing soothing words in Chinese and with an English interpreter, explaining in detail how things are going.

Sigh, The Slow is getting me and everyone else riled up. We might as well get some form of entertainment from it all.

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