Here's the thing. We live outside of a small city or large town, depending on your perspective. Far enough out that we don't get cable here, and it doesn't look as though we will be getting it anytime soon. I make frequent calls to QWest to ask them about this, and they will never really tell me much beyond the fact that expansion into this area is not on the books. Yet, they always add.

All this means is that we have satellite for television reception, and no access to a fast internet connection. We do have ISDN, which is (as I understand it) simply a bundle of dedicated telephone lines. A lot faster than a dial-up connection, but tons slower than DSL.

I do a lot of research on line, a good deal of which requires looking at graphic images of journal pages. I have an extensive genealogical database on line. I also do quite a lot of website maintenance, both my own and for the Garden Sense Online site, which involves moving a lot of big graphic images around. I download audiobooks. My daughter is addicted to itunes, and spends all her allowance downloading music. My husband, who also works at home, is constantly online and sometimes has to up or download huge data sets. (An aside: just recently I ran into a paragraph written by Bill's co-investigator on some grant, and for the first time in the fifteen years that he has been working on this project, I actually understood what he does. In the technobabble spirit of this post, I include it here:)

W.D.K. Green is the sole designer and programmer of Edgewarp, a 25,000-line sophisticated workstation package for manipulation of 2D and 3D biomedical images and related data structures by a combination of landmark location, thin-plate spline, and image unwarping and averaging. It is built of C and C++ code and makes extensive use of SGI's OpenGL graphics interface. Communication with the user is by textual and graphical interfaces managed using TCL/TK, a general purpose scripting language. Since 1995 a series of steadily more powerful releases of Edgewarp have been released for free downloading from the internet, along with source codes for the versions prior to 1996. Currently the linux versions are by far the most popular. Edgewarp has been exploited in a huge variety of scientific contexts, from systematics and evolutionary biology to radiology, teratology, and kinesiology. It has also stimulated diverse reverse-engineered implementations of its pieces for other computing environments, such as the Rohlf series of thin-plate spline programs for Windows and the Pittsburgh "Visible Browser" for navigation of Eve. A decade after its initial release, Edgewarp remains the sole general purpose image comparison package, commercial or noncommercial, and continues to spin off new visualization tools and analytic strategies.

cha cha cha.

So back to the issue at hand: you can see that we suffer under the restrictions of an ISDN line. I have looked into satellite internet, which would be worth the considerable cost (installation alone is five hundred bucks) if the technology were just reliable, and there weren't all kinds of restrictions on how much you can use it. And a delay, I'm told, of up to two seconds. And all other kinds of problems (uploading, apparently, is slower than what we have now; downloading is four times faster -- I asked if we could order ala carte, two times faster up and two times faster down, a side of eggroll, but the person on the phone didn't even crack a smile).

Sometimes I get desperate, and I think about calling up QWest and demanding that they come out here and lay the cable, damn the cost, full speed ahead! But then sanity kicks back in and I remember we have a daughter who will be going off to college in two years and that four years at her college of choice, along with travel, room, board and books, will most certain hit the $150,000 mark.

Thus my tale of woe.

If you happen to be the head of QWest, or you babysit his/her kids, or you play canasta with his/her father, or you were in the armed forces with his/her mother, sister, cousin, best friend, would you put in a good word for us out here in the boondocks? I promise you the moon, or at least something good to eat, pretty to look at, or fun to read.