Forward into the 21st century!

Who, you ask? My mother. Yes, the senior Mrs. Chicken, who has been on e-mail for much of this century, has decided to finally leave the dial-up connection behind. My nephew Matt will be thrilled to no longer have to wade through the swamp the Internets become when using Mom's dial-up connection. I think it has something to do with the fact that the phone lines were laid when the community was built back in the 50's, but as far as I know she's never had a connection faster than about 2400 baud. If that. Slow as, um, something really slow.

What pushed her to this? Well, I kind of did. I mentioned what I thought was a new cell tower on the outskirts of the neighborhood and she said "Oh, no, that's for that wireless internet thing."

This led to a discussion of Clearwire and their service and the other high-speed options available to her. After doing some pricing research it turned out that DSL was a better deal because a) the price incentive was longer (6 months @ $19.95 rather than only 3) and she wouldn't have to change her e-mail address since Earthlink can get her the DSL service.

The big advantage, I suppose, is that now when her e-mail system crashes and she calls me for tech support I won't have to say "OK, when you connect next time and see that error try this and then call me back..."!