globelines Archives | Leon Kilat : The Tech Experiments

For more than a year, I have been moving my data online as part of an experiment to make the network my computer. With the telecoms disruption caused by a recent earthquake in Taiwan, my world crashed.

As I write this, the Globelines Broadband connection I have at home is still horrendously slow. It is a 7.8 mbps line to nowhere. I was giddy upon seeing for the first time the notification that my connection to Globelines is 7.8 mbps (it used to say 2 mbps). Now, the notice feels like a taunt.

It takes about as much time to load pages with Globelines Broadband right now as it would take a Sinulog contingent to finish a dance. To say the connection is as slow as molasses would be to overstate the viscosity of the substance.

It was a good thing that I use Gmail for mobile application in my phone, a Sony Ericsson k750i using a Smart pre-paid subscription. I can open my GMail messages faster on my phone than I could using Globelines in my home PC. Half of the time, I couldn’t even get past the Gmail login screen when I use the Globelines connection.

Internet connection has been dismal these past few days following the earthquake in Taiwan that cut submarine cables connecting parts of Asia to the Internet. The Globelines Broadband account I use at home chokes on most web sites. When I connect using it, I’d be able to load pages for the first few minutes and then the connection gets stalled again.

The intermittent connection has made me dependent these past few days on the PLDT WeRoam account temporarily assigned to my wife. WeRoam isn’t as fast as Globelines BQ (before the quake) but with it, I manage to check my mails and browse “must-visit” sites such as del.icio.us and Lifehacker. I seldom visit, let alone log into, my blog these days because of the awful connection speeds. Luckily, I managed to open my Google Reader an hour back and read JAngelo’s post about a vulnerability in WordPress, the open source script I use in this site. I promptly logged into my blog and found that version 2.0.6 has been released.

Seeing that WordPress 2.0.6 “includes an important security fix,” I quickly prepared to update blogs I run and help manage. Before last week, I wouldn’t have dared upgrading my blog using WeRoam. The signal at home is weak and my previous attempt at using WeRoam’s connection to FTP files to my server had me giving up after a few minutes, it was so slow I decided to switch to Globelines.

But today, WeRoam is fast. Not Globelines fast but fast enough for FTP uploading of files to the server. Thank God. With my blogs updated, now I can sleep.