I‘m going to start today by going down memory lane in telling you our entire history of being on the internet. I’m sure it will sound quite familiar. Back in the earliest days of the internet, we had an Amiga 4000 computer and an MS-DOS Windows 3.1 computer.
We’ve been on the internet since it was text and FTP. It was raw and like the Old West. There were no colorful screens with pictures and videos. Groups developed around everything you could imagine. There was no World Wide Web yet. AOL really did open up a new look that transitioned the internet from just text and the ability to send files and pics into the internet web we know now.
I’ll bet most of you were early adopters like us. When the internet really got started we could keep up with the rest of the world using modems. Our first one was 9600 baud. That was the shiznit once upon a time. The transfer rate was 960 bytes per second. A byte is eight bits and it takes eight bits of info per character. If you ever downloaded a picture, you’d go eat dinner then come back to see how far along things had gotten. Once modems hit speeds of 56,000 baud, we were in heaven.
Then a funny thing happened. It started taking longer to do things on the internet than it had before which was due to more and more bandwidth being sucked up by more and more modems. Modems and the internet were our lifelines to other like-minded folks since we’ve lived where we live since the toddler days of the internet. Prior to moving here, we’d lived in Santa Cruz which was right on the edge of Silicon Valley so we were imbued with everything in the computer world from the get-go. When we lived there as it was happening...well, everyone got infected by the contagion in real time. Being right there at ground zero was exciting for sure.
Our ability to keep up with the internet was stuck at 56,000 baud. We could only get one TV station using an antenna where we live. There was no cable. The phone lines were still the original twisted copper wire ones put in in the 1940s. Still, it had to be good enough. At that time we could have gotten a satellite dish, but those things were quite expensive and huge. Plus you really didn’t have great choices of what you could get overall via a satellite dish. No way. In time, the small satellite dishes were invented as satellites were sent up that beamed much stronger signals. We got a PrimeStar for next to nothing as the satellite companies were giving them away to get customers for their services. DirectTV later bought out PrimeStar.
Eventually, the phone line here was upgraded and could handle DSL. But where we live, it’s lousy. For some reason, the speed is only 1/4th of normal DSL. It also is flakey in terms of being stable around here. We had a neighbor who had it and was really unable to stream successfully most of the time. And that was way before HD was around. We never went for it and stuck with our DirectTV and our 56,000 baud modems.
Finally, cable came here. It’s Xfinity (Comcast) and has cable-modem speeds. We ditched our satellite dish and switched over to Xfinity for everything. Where we live the cable is the only truly fast internet connection. Hughes Satellite is not really a good option. We can stream reliably now which means we have joined the rest of the world.
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There are countless choices of things we can stream. Streaming has allowed for so many more talented actors and storytellers to get their stuff out there. We have Netflix and Amazon Video that we access through a ROKU. I wanted to tell you about a few shows we’ve watched recently. Our habit is to come home from work, eat dinner, most times watch some news/politics then watch something that is simple brain candy before going to bed...just to cleanse the mind before sleeping. We typically have a few shows that we’re watching at any time with at least one being totally stupid and silly.
We enjoyed Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States which goes from the 20th century to right now. It’s the history we weren’t taught. It’s the whole history of things with all warts and crap too on top of the sanitized version we got. It’s on Netflix. I think you can see most episodes on youtube now as well.
Neeta let us know about a zombie movie. We watch the Walking Dead which has slow zombies. There are fast as friggin’ hell zombies too. The movie we watched just last weekend is Train to Busan. Do not watch this before going to bed.
There are more and more series based on comic books. We watched a really tweaked and very enjoyable one called The End of the F**king World. It’s on Netflix.
For total mindless silliness, we’ve been watching Schitt’s Creek. It has two of my favorite SCTV folks working together: Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy. This show is purely for shits and giggles...nothing more.
I read science fiction all the time growing up. I loved short stories best. We’ve watched Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams on Amazon. Really good!
One more very trippy SciFi show we loved. If you wanted to know what could go wrong with living forever, you’ll love Altered Carbon.
Do you stream? What are you streaming now? What network or cable shows do you currently watch?
What do you want to talk about today?
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