I've got to get a life, or high speed access, one

I just read my logs and I'm in shock!

Though I am technically within the boundaries of the city of Fort Worth, Texas, in actuality I am in a semi-rural location. The only Internet access we can get is dialup. Oh, satellite is available, but my wife and I cannot currently afford that. The wireless provider we were going to sign up with went bust before we could contribute our fees to them and though they've restarted under new owners (apparently with sufficient funding) we're too poor to do that one, too.

I have a good dialup connection, using Fry's low-cost ISP service. Most of my connections are at 45k or better and occasionally I top 50k. The connection is stable and eminently usable. But high speed is not a term one associates with dialup. Persistence is, at least in my case. I am a dogged downloader, to say the least.

My logs show me that from 1 January, '04, to 31 January, '04, I downloaded 7.1 GIGABYTES of stuff on my dialup! This even though I spent 6 days in the hospital during that time. (Even with the vacation at the quack shack, this is my highest up and download totals for any month, ever.) About half of the stuff I transferred was Linux stuff for my own and my client's use and the rest was Windows executables for installation and test for the show. I also uploaded 704 MB of files in January; web sites and large graphics and CAD files for a client.

Like Microsoft's new offering of Unix tools (which they have decided to distribute for no charge). That download alone was about 200 MB. I have it on file, here, though I've not installed it yet because I'm also installing my Linux boxes again and downloading updates for them.

I've got to do something about this. I've even recently been tossed off an ISP because of the amount of time I spend connected; often 3 full days at a shot. Either that or find something to occupy the time, besides the boob tube and pestering my wife.