Weaving the World Wide Web

"Oh What a World Wide Web we weave, when at first we practice, to retrieve." something I wrote somewhere, deliberately misquoting someone; Shakespeare I think.

I'm in a complaining mood today. My internet connection is slowing up. I try to access my servers when away from home and I just get drop outs and service hangs. The early days of the internet, on a dial up 56k modem are starting to look like a practical alternative to this broadband nonsense.

The problem, of course, is that everyone and their daughter is now on the system. It was bad enough when people were swapping songs illegally, but now entire movies and even .iso files (images of CD's and DVD's) are being pushed over the net. Even the telephone infastructure is starting to use the internet. "It canna take it, Jim. We don't have the power!" (Scottie, Star Trek, may that wonderfully charismatic man rest in peace. I'm not sure if his ashes have been fired in to space yet. [reminder to self - google it at work])

The Internet has become a very unstable market place. " Anything can happen in the next half hour," (Stingray) and usually does. My first package cost a small fortune every month and didn't even come with any web space. Now, I've got hundreds of meg thrown in, as well as PHP and MySQL, Perl and all sorts of fancy stuff, for a fraction of the relative cost. The packages are changing faster than I change my underwear. [sniff, sniff ... hmmm]

No longer do I feel as if I am purchasing a stable product; rather I feel like I'm hanging on to a tram pole with grim determination as it launches itself off San Francisco's hills. Just like my car and contents insurance, I have to trawl through the various providers every year to get the best deal, and then put up with the outages as the service switches from one place to another. Me? Stressed? I'M NOT STRESSED!

I think I'll go back to the printed word; seems to be a more unique media these days.