Everything but Nothing
It's been a month since I came here, setup an apartment, roped in a roommate, picked up a tv, music system, notebook, digital camera what not..and today got the cable and a broadband internet access. I can now do whatever I want, I have all the time in the world and all the facilities but, something is lacking. I have a feeling of having everything but nothing. This run against time, this never ending quest for something which happens to be nothing.
I was pretty restless today when the cable guy didn't turn up for the installation on time. I was raring to check out the broadband internet access. I was so pumped up and excited about the whole thing that a 3 hour wait felt too a little too long for comfort. Yeah, ultimately the cable guy did turn up and luckily was no "Jim Carrey" type of cable guy, so everything went smooth. The guy figured out all physical cable installations and hooked it up with internal cables in my apt.. Then to my surprise he handed me a self Installation kit which pretty much had all the details to get the internet access up and running. After all that wait I was asked to read few pages of manual get the internet access up and running. I hate reading manuals, simply puts me off. In India atleast the service industry doesn't work that way. Any service is installed up till the last point that it can be made use by the customer instantly, that's basically spoon feeding or otherwise good customer support, it's how you see it. There is a catch though, If it's the telephone department the lines man will finish all the work, make couple of calls and will tell you that the service is fit for use and then will wait - indefinitely, sometimes making strange gestures like scratching his head or trying to explain more about the service, repeating information that was already told etc. There by indicating that you are supposed to tip him for the service. Well,now I feel that nothing comes free, it's no different here, if you want premium service you will have to pay for it, otherwise contend with few 100 pages of instruction manual. In my case I was a little too desperate to get the service up and running. First thing I did was to shove away all the manuals and pick up the cables, joints and the splitter. It was pretty straight forward, fix a RF splitter on to the input on the wall and connect the outputs to the cable modem and the TV. Switch on the cable modem and and plug the UTP patch cable ends on to the modem and the laptop. Opened the browser, typed the URl and pressed enter.... poof ! nothing happened, I got the message "Page cannot be displayed". Ok, now I didn't have a choice, I was actually forced to look into the manual. A quick look at the manual indicated that I needed to activate my account by giving a 15 digit account number, come on a 15 digit account was quite unpleasant. For me to read the 15 digit # and type it in was like trying to transfer 1.2MB from the old 5 1/4 drive too a sick h/d with a lots of bad blocks. After registration a customary reboot as always recommended by Windoze, even if you had wiped out some dirt off your screen you would still need to restart windows for it to work properly.
Viola ! I had broadband internet access atlast. First job was to checkout the download speeds. Tried to download doom3 demo ~430MB download started at 400KB per second that's KiloBytes per second but gradually decreased and settled at about 120KB/sec still it was pretty good. I was struggling to get gmail working, didn't open for some reasons, is it like gmail doesn't work over broadband :-) or doesn't work if I try to access it over a broadband ? I could do everything except check my email. Strange world ! Strange systems ! I seemed to have lost all the excitement. yes, I have broadband internet access, so what ? what difference does it make ? nothing, nothingness is reality.
Now, the most interesting part, as I sat wondering what this nothingness was all about, realised that I now had a always on internet access so could look up google for any information anytime. A quick search on google enlightened me that a lot of people have thought about nothingness. There was even a nothingness theory :-).
I was pretty restless today when the cable guy didn't turn up for the installation on time. I was raring to check out the broadband internet access. I was so pumped up and excited about the whole thing that a 3 hour wait felt too a little too long for comfort. Yeah, ultimately the cable guy did turn up and luckily was no "Jim Carrey" type of cable guy, so everything went smooth. The guy figured out all physical cable installations and hooked it up with internal cables in my apt.. Then to my surprise he handed me a self Installation kit which pretty much had all the details to get the internet access up and running. After all that wait I was asked to read few pages of manual get the internet access up and running. I hate reading manuals, simply puts me off. In India atleast the service industry doesn't work that way. Any service is installed up till the last point that it can be made use by the customer instantly, that's basically spoon feeding or otherwise good customer support, it's how you see it. There is a catch though, If it's the telephone department the lines man will finish all the work, make couple of calls and will tell you that the service is fit for use and then will wait - indefinitely, sometimes making strange gestures like scratching his head or trying to explain more about the service, repeating information that was already told etc. There by indicating that you are supposed to tip him for the service. Well,now I feel that nothing comes free, it's no different here, if you want premium service you will have to pay for it, otherwise contend with few 100 pages of instruction manual. In my case I was a little too desperate to get the service up and running. First thing I did was to shove away all the manuals and pick up the cables, joints and the splitter. It was pretty straight forward, fix a RF splitter on to the input on the wall and connect the outputs to the cable modem and the TV. Switch on the cable modem and and plug the UTP patch cable ends on to the modem and the laptop. Opened the browser, typed the URl and pressed enter.... poof ! nothing happened, I got the message "Page cannot be displayed". Ok, now I didn't have a choice, I was actually forced to look into the manual. A quick look at the manual indicated that I needed to activate my account by giving a 15 digit account number, come on a 15 digit account was quite unpleasant. For me to read the 15 digit # and type it in was like trying to transfer 1.2MB from the old 5 1/4 drive too a sick h/d with a lots of bad blocks. After registration a customary reboot as always recommended by Windoze, even if you had wiped out some dirt off your screen you would still need to restart windows for it to work properly.
Viola ! I had broadband internet access atlast. First job was to checkout the download speeds. Tried to download doom3 demo ~430MB download started at 400KB per second that's KiloBytes per second but gradually decreased and settled at about 120KB/sec still it was pretty good. I was struggling to get gmail working, didn't open for some reasons, is it like gmail doesn't work over broadband :-) or doesn't work if I try to access it over a broadband ? I could do everything except check my email. Strange world ! Strange systems ! I seemed to have lost all the excitement. yes, I have broadband internet access, so what ? what difference does it make ? nothing, nothingness is reality.
Now, the most interesting part, as I sat wondering what this nothingness was all about, realised that I now had a always on internet access so could look up google for any information anytime. A quick search on google enlightened me that a lot of people have thought about nothingness. There was even a nothingness theory :-).
