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Moving and Life Without Broadband

Well, I've finally moved into London. Now, I loved Amersham, and I still do, but it's not the ideal town for someone my age. There are fewer pubs to charity shops (at last count there were about 6 charity shops on the high street and one pub anywhere near!) which should maybe go some way towards giving you a picture of the demographic makeup of Amersham. It also had what is probably the only kebab house that actually closed before the pub did, which seems slightly counter intuitive, after all, as they taste best after a few rounds.

Unfortunately, it's taking a little while to get a phone line and broadband Internet connection set up here. In the interim, I've been using one of those 3G Internet dongles to connect, which on the whole has been pleasantly surprising. The download speed is generally very good, and seems only marginally slower than the broadband connection that I had in Amersham. Also, the latency of the connection is better than expected, to the point where I've even been able to use it to get in a couple of hours of World of Warcraft time. There were a few days last week where I had a few problems with it though, as the carrier network 3 was having some technical issues at their end which caused the speeds to drop from 3G to GPRS, with frequent disconnections that made it very difficult to work. It also led to the online data transfer count system for 3 to be out of service. As this the first couple of weeks I'd been using the dongle, I was worried about hitting my data limits, and not being able to check my usage statistics did little to help matters. It was needless worry though, as the data I had already used barely dented my allowance. The other downside with a dongle is sharing the Internet connection. I've got two computers here, and thought nothing before of transferring files about across the network and having an Internet connection on both of them at once. With the dongle, I've found it's easiest to just not connect the computers to the router to network them, and transfer everything with pen drives and external hard disks, and I just plug the dongle into whichever one I wish to use if I need the Internet. So, no more gaming online and replying to emails in a reprive on my laptop.

One thing I look forward to with the move is (hopefully) no more calls from job agents trying to contact me about jobs miles away from where I lived because I happened to be in the same county. I guess the automatic candidate selection software that these companies uses can't understand that even though the distance between Buckingham and Amersham is the same as London to Amersham as the crow flies, the actual traveling distance is shorter and easier for the latter. Despite me telling them that I London was best for me, I'd still get contacted about jobs anywhere but London!