the wertz generation

DSL comes to central Pennsylvania! About a week ago, we got a notice informing us that DSL is now available through a local phone company. Today it was finally installed. Tomorrow I take a hatchet to the damned satellite dish and turn it into a birdbath.

The dish - or the bread plate as it's affectionately known around these parts - has proved to be a grievous disappointment since it was installed last June. We'd been thrown back to dial-up when we moved back to Pennsylvania and, after three months, thought the satellite service would be a welcome relief. Wrong. After the first four days, our download rate averaged about 15kbs. And every twelve to seventeen minutes, the service connection would cut off and resume from two to five minutes later. We never even bothered with a router and Sean had been using dial-up since we moved. On my machine: no streaming, no large downloads, no live chat - and slow, frequently interrupted page loads.

I signed a year's contract with the useless bread plate people which lasts another four months, but that direct deposit has been canceled. If they want additional payments, too bad. They can take their freakin' birdbath back and sell it on eBay.

In any event, my presence around here had been severely curtailed, my posts infrequent and capricious, and, while I occasionally glanced through my friends' posts, I seldom, if ever, commented. Hence, I have, no doubt, missed huge chunks of many of your lives. If I've missed anything serious (or particularly entertaining), let me know. Also, hey - if there are livejournalists you'd recommend, please do.

The DSL connection isn't brilliant, but I'm hoping to start catching up over the coming weeks...

I spent some of my offline time playing with images and have sporadically introduced a number new icons. I'd been using a single graphic for all things arts-related, so I diversified there a bit (theatre, music, film, books, and photography):