I took the morning off to attend the inspection of our upcoming home. I finally got to see why Michelle said I should "trust her". It had a nice character inside. It felt lived-in and that the family tried to make it a warm home. Seven years ago I did not attend the inspection of our current Nashua home. I learned a lot about homes today: their construction, their potential problems, what to watch for, etc. A septic system guy came in to inspect and explain septic systems to us. Ah, the science of sh*t! (grin)
A minor point of concern for me is whether I'll have any reasonable broadband capabilities. The quaintness of Milford might also mean lack of access to DSL or cable modem technologies. I'll look into it when I move in. Verizon offers DSL in Milford, but I doubt I'm close enough to the Milford Verizon central office to get that service. I think Adelphia provides Milford's cable service. They have a notoriously bad reputation here in the New England area. Of course, I've been hearing that satellite internet is finally becoming a stable technology. That may take some research if there's no DSL or cable modem access.
While I have occasionally mentioned our iMac, I also do a fair amount of email, web surfing, and weblog updating from an old laptop. It's a Pentium 133MHz with 32MBytes of RAM and about a gigabyte of harddisk space. It's definitely worthless from a hardware standpoint! I run Vector Linux (a lightweight linux OS distribution) on it. While it does have a GUI available, I tend to do a lot of my stuff in text mode on it. It comes from having used computers before GUIs were common, especially in college and in the AF. For web browsing I use a program called elinks which does an unbelievably decent job at text mode web browsing. I have a snapshot of my home page as viewed in elinks.
The funny thing to me is that a typical website loads about as fast in plain old text mode elinks on an old laptop with a 56K modem as it's graphical counterpart in Internet Explorer on a new fast computer with broadband internet. Years ago when Windows first appeared on PCs, the common complaint was that it made a (then) fast PC run like molasses. Now that we live in an era where computer hardware is orders of magnitude faster, we hardly notice the GUI overhead anymore. Spend some time in text mode again and you remember how snappy computers used to feel. Perhaps if I get relegated to phone dialup modem usage again I'll be using that old computer a lot more. ;-)
