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catching up
It’s been almost a year and a half since I moved from the little
city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to the deep woods of Nottingham
(population 3,300). I now live on a dirt road that winds for about
a mile through hemlocks, white pines, birches, oaks, and maples
down to a lake. And I do mean down–if my driveway were a ski slope, it would be marked
with a black diamond. You may recall a column I wrote in April
of last year in which I whined about how my dialup internet connection
speed dropped from just under 56 kbs in town to just over 28 kbs
out here in the boondocks. It was as if I had been exiled to 1997!
Well, it’s time to play some catch up.
I was actually kind of surprised when ATT brought its Roadrunner
cable modem service to this neck of the woods last fall. Most
of the folks on our road are summer people; they had to string
a lot of cable to wire just a handful of year-round houses. Of
course, I immediately jumped at the chance to go broadband; researching
a column on the net in slo-mo is no fun. The trouble started because
I wanted to share the fast new connection with my wife; we each
have our own computer. I suppose I could have bought two of the pricey–about $250–cable modems from Circuit City and paid
ATT for two internet connections at $30 a month, but I thought I had a simpler
and cheaper solution: I’d build a home network.
Home networks are happening, and it isn’t hard to see why. Not
only are they the most sensible way to share a broadband connection,
but you can also share scanners and printers and just about anything
you have on your hard drive or that is hanging off the back of
your CPU. There are three ways to go, conventional Ethernet, phone
line and wireless. Conventional is the cheapest and fastest way
to connect computers, but you’ll have to string wire. You can
use your existing phone lines if they’ve been installed correctly–not
a given, believe me! Wireless is the slowest and most expensive,
but the most convenient.
network hell
I worried as I watched myself type the preceding that you might
be lulled into thinking I’m an expert in these matters. Nothing
could be further from the truth! I have no idea how to install
an Ethernet or wireless network and based on my experience struggling
with our new phone line network, I would have to classify myself
as somewhat worse than a bumbling incompetent.
Here are some of the things that went wrong with my installation:
one of those teensy little wires inside the phone jack was crossed
in my office–okay, so I strung those myself. Windows 95 can address
only one Ethernet card and it doesn’t really support USB. Windows
95 couldn’t see the Netgear PCI card and then when it did, it
crashed. The network cards in each of our two computers couldn’t
see each other. Thanks to an obscure program called WINIPCFG,
I learned more than I really wanted to know about protocol stacks
and TCP/IP and NetBEUI. Meanwhile, all the installation wizards
I tried seemed to have flunked out of Hogwarts. The network was
up for maybe a week, but then I installed a firewall that brought
it down again. Enough geeking? On a more personal note, when I
called Netgear’s tech support line, the wait was usually between
ten and twenty minutes before I spoke to a human being, who would
give me something to try and then ring off before I could see
if it worked or not. Mostly it didn’t.
It took about four months from the day I had the cable modem installed
to the day I had a network that ran fairly reliably. In that time,
I gave up on my Windows 95 computer and bought a new one with
Windows 98. If it hadn’t been for all my network troubles, I probably
would have put up with the old box for at least six months, or
maybe a year.
To anyone interested in installing any kind of home network, my
advice is to consider getting professional help. Someday the network
marketers’ fantasy of streamlined installation, automated wizards
and 24/7 tech support may become fact, but I’m afraid that might
well be the day after we launch our first faster-than-light starship.
And if you insist on building a network yourself, all I can say
is "Be afraid. Be very afraid."
So, you may be wondering, was broadband worth all this pain and
suffering? Oh my, yes. I find that connecting at twenty to thirty times my old dial-up
speed has changed my experience of the net profoundly. Web pages
don’t merely load with broadband; they snap to attention. I can watch movies now and listen to music. And
the net is always just a click away, which is a difference in
convenience something like getting your water from a hand pump
as opposed to turning on a faucet.
By the way, if you’re wondering just how fast your current connection
is, check out the test at DSLreports.com http://www.dslreports.com/stest . When you’re done, backtrack to the home page. DSLreports.com can help you find and rate broadband providers in your area, answer your questions
about the different types of service and suggest tweaks to squeeze
more speed out of your connection. DSL stands for Digital Subscriber Line, another technology for providing fast internet access, but
DSLreports.com does a great job of reporting on all broadband services.
extra catch up
In the same issue in which I bemoaned my sluggish net connection,
I also wrote that I was changing my default search engine from
Excite <http://www.excite.com >to Dogpile <http://www.dogpile.com>. Although I still use Dogpile as a backup–it is particularly
handy for quick checks of the Usenet–I now rely on Google <http://www.google.com/>. There’s a lot to like about this site, starting with its spare
home page. It isn’t about giving you a free email account or bringing
you the latest basketball scores or helping you get a date; it’s
about finding stuff on the world wide web, period. And it does its work very well indeed, thanks to clever software
that employs link popularity as a way to determine search relevance.
The more sites that link to a site, the higher up it appears on
the list of search results. For example, when I asked Google to
search for science fiction, its top five sites were The Linköping Science Fiction & Fantasy Archive <http://www2.lysator.liu.se/sf_archive/sf_main.html, The Science Fiction Resource Guide <http://sflovers.rutgers.edu/SFRG/>, Scifi.com <http://www.scifi.com/>
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. http://www.sfwa.org/, and The SF Site <http://www.sfsite.com/>, which are, in fact, five of the very best science fiction sites.
Earlier this year, Google won the Outstanding Search Service Award
and Most Webmaster Friendly Award from Search Engine Watch <http://www.searchenginewatch.com/>.
Speaking of which, you should definitely click over to Search
Engine Watch some time, because, good as it is, Google is not
the last word in web searching. Here is a site that lists and
rates search engines, and is particularly good at pointing you
to places where you can search the "deep web," those precincts
that general search engines have yet to discover. For example,
there were two winners of Search Engine Watch’s best Meta Search
engine: my old favorite Dogpile and Ixquick <http://www.ixquick.com/>, which I had never heard of but which I found well worth a visit.
I did a quick ego-surf of Ixquick–you will recall that ego-surfing
involves typing one’s own name into a search engine–and came across
a couple of pages that I, as a James Patrick Kelly completist,
had never seen before. Winner for best Specialty Search Engine
was Moreover <http://www.moreover.com>, a news search engine. I can definitely recommend Moreover not
only to news junkies but to anyone doing research into what’s
happening now. Traditional search engines are inept when it comes
to covering current events and sites like CNN.com <http://www.cnn.com/> are not necessarily the answer when it comes to hunting down
yesterday’s headlines.
the best
Finally, let’s catch up with one of the best new SF sites on the
web. In April of last year, the same month as my column on search
engines and slow connections was published, I had an email from
one Mark Watson, who invited me to click his site Best SF <http://www.bestsf.net/>. Although I liked what I saw, Best SF was clearly a work in
progress and I wrote back to tell him that I hoped he could make
some improvements and that I would catch up with him in a future
column. Well, the future is now and I’m pleased to say that Best
SF is not hyperbole when it comes to describing this site. Actually
it’s three sites in one: a database of some eight hundred stories
that have been reprinted in various Best of the Year collections,
a gateway to three hundred stories that are available for downloading
from the web and a review section in which Mark dissects the latest
offerings from a variety of publications. When Mark first contacted
me, Best SF consisted of the database only and it was woefully
incomplete. But aside from the fact that the database would make
a wonderful tool for readers, what attracted me were brief summaries
of the stories, usually no more than a sentence or two. Most are
just straightforward description–what Hollywood types might call
a story’s high concept–but some read like Zen koans, some like
one-liners and a few bite deeper in a handful of words than more
verbose critics could do in pages. Here’s how he describes Connie
Willis’s Hugo winning "Death on the Nile": "SF? Horror? Crime?
Fantasy? Agatha Christie? All of these, and more." The gateway
is a useful resource for finding new stories to read; I can’t
think of another site with a list this comprehensive. Mark has
really just started to post reviews of new short fiction but his
is a welcome new voice in an area where there is nowhere near
enough diversity. Judging by what he has written thus far, his
approval is well worth having and his scorn is to be feared.
exit
It is an indisputable fact that one is never caught up for long
these days. The speedy Pentium III processor in my not-so-new-anymore
computer has already been superseded by the speedier Pentium IV
chip. Windows 98 is looking a little dusty with the advent of
Windows ME and Windows 2000. And while my broadband is pretty
broad, thank you, I read of folks who connect at 1 or 1.5 mbs and am envious.
But then I think of the folks who can’t afford broadband or the
latest hardware or any damn hardware at all. The only computer
that lots of people have access to is the one at their local library.
The Digital Divide is real and it is a problem and it is going
to get much, much worse. Those of us who are roaring down the
information superhighway at 600 kbs need to deal with the implications
of leaving people behind.
It occurs to me that worrying about a digitally divided future
ought to be the special responsibility of us science fiction folk.
After all, that’s what we’re supposed to be good at. |
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