This evening, we finally got cable Internet at home.

Just in time – I was about to explode after seeing my last phone bill – almost 9000 bucks!

The process of getting hooked on was surprisingly painless – unlike the soddy providers who force you to use Windows-only mechanisms, my cable guy showed up at my door with an RJ-45 Ethernet cable in hand, asking “ok, where do you want me to plug it in?” No cable modem, not device driver hell, no nothing – he just plugged it into my ethernet card, I configured the machine with the info he provided, “/sbin/service network restart”, and I was on. This was under Linux – under Windows, it took more time as Microsoft took such pains to hide all relevant settings in XP.

Not exceptionally fast, but not slower than dialup. Supposed to get better soon, but for now, I am happy just to know that I am not spending Rs.1.50 every three minutes anymore. For those who don’t know what a difference that would make – those Rs.9000 I mentioned above were for the Internet-only phone line – no voice calls are ever made on that line!

This week is probably going to be the most intense of my recent life, thanks to final preps for Linux Bangalore/2002. I hope I survive this.