Connected at last! Sort of...

So, after the good folks at Comcast kindly told us it would cost $78,000 plus change to get cable internet extended to our place out in the boonies, I said thank you very much I'll give that some thought.

No kidding. I threw away the letter, but that was the quoted price to extend the backbone cable the three miles needed to provide us and our neighbors with service. They had a nice, accessible formula they used to calculate the cost, and said that we could reduce the price to $3000 per home if we could talk 15 of our neighbors into a 2-year contract.

No DSL available out here either.

So that left WildBlue satellite. Twice the price, half the speed, and it tends to cut out when it's raining or snowing really hard. Surely that won't happen too often, right? Does that sound like a deal, or what?

It will take a little getting used to: pages can take up to a minute to load, but large downloads move quickly, unlike dial-up. It's functional in a sort of former Soviet Union government agency kind of way.

So a very polite and quiet young man came out last week to install the new dish. He spent a couple of hours all together, between getting it mounted, configured, pointed, etc. And he ran the cable into my office where I hooked it into the wireless network. Anyhow, he'd been at work in the office for a while when I wandered in and sat down to ask him a couple of questions.

That's when I spotted the calendar.


The week before as I started unpacking the office, making the first dent in a wall of boxes several feet thick, I came across a 2005 calendar I'd picked up somewhere. Entertaining to look at, I'd never really put it up because I never had a basement workroom or garage that was suitable as an appropriate home for that kind of calendar. Dad always had the Rigid Tools calendar in the garage above his workbench, but I never found just the right spot for San Francisco Hairy Chests 2005.

So when I found it in a box of miscellaneous crap, I thought hey, these guys can keep me company while I'm busy unpacking. And up they went. On the wall, I mean. Well, most of them were up already, but that's beside the point.
Which brings us back to the quiet, professional satellite installer. I mean, call me old-fashioned, but I think it's impolite to inflict your soft-core porn on complete strangers who are only doing their job. And he'd been there doing his job for at least half an hour already. I was abashed. What do you do? "Gosh, what is HE doing here? He must have wandered up from the basement." It's not as if it was a magazine you could kick under the desk. It's hard to casually take a calendar down from the wall, you know? Who knows, maybe he appreciated it.

If your curiosity is getting the better of you, you can click on the image to see him in all his glory. But don't say you haven't been warned.