A glimmer of hope (a personal note)

I've recently been through a time of stress and torment: yes, my ADSL line has been down since Friday. The good news is that an engineer has been scheduled for Thursday morning. Using dial-up has been frustrating, but of course, it depends what you are used to. A 44kbps (V.90) connection seemed pretty wonderful a couple of years ago. Further back than I care to remember, using a 300bps connection via an acoustic coupler seemed pretty wonderful, too. I was getting e-mail at 10 characters a second, then, compared with 57,000 characters a second using ADSL. Mind you, I was only getting about five e-mails a day, and four out of every five weren't spam.