Unworkable!

As long-time readers of this blog will know (there are a few of you), I have been having problems with my home Internet connection for around 3 months now. The recent massive disruption of the Internet attributed to the oceanbed earthquake off Taiwan three weeks ago has long since largely been cured everywhere else in Asia; it has even, I think, largely been cured elsewhere in this country where I live, elsewhere in this city. It's just this neighbourhood - maybe just me - that's still completely fucked! In fact, things have been getting worse rather than better over the past week-and-a-half.

Last night I set a new record for a reported file transfer rate - 37 bytes per second!! The server was actually being remarkably generous in allowing me the better part of an hour to attempt to download a relatively small 'Word' file before declaring me 'timed out'. After the third attempt, I gave up and went out for dinner and a few beers. Even at 4.30am - the only hour when traffic has been low enough locally for my connection to function of late - this download still only fitfully attained a transfer speed of a few megs per second, and took a total of a whopping 8 minutes.

I have been so anxious about trying to deal with important (family and business) e-mail, that I have, for the last 3 or 4 nights, been waking regularly at 4am, finding myself unable to fall back to sleep, and stumbling groggily into the study to check out my wee-small-hours connection speed. I am sick with fatigue: eyes puffy and black-ringed, speech slurred, brain fogged, temper on a hair-trigger.

I am at my tether's end. No, the tether snapped some time ago: I am now running around, loose and frantic, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog.

I am really beginning to think that I may have to move to a new neighbourhood.... somewhere where they have something better than 1950s single-strand copper wire telephone cabling.

Yes, that sound you hear in your imagination is my molars splintering.....