I Love Technology, But Does Technology Love Me?

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I am listening in my truck to an Audible book about the landing of a man on the moon in 1969.

The story includes mention of historical events including the introduction of the personal computer. I would like to think that I am somewhat of a tech geek. I purchased my first PC in 1986. It had a green screen monitor. To use it, you had to insert a 5 ¼ inch floppy disk into the slot. Then you could access a basic Word document. To bring up a spreadsheet, I had to launch Lotus 1-2-3 using the same type of floppy disk. My printer was an IBM dot matrix printer. And I have had PCs and then laptops ever since.

So why am I having so much trouble today with an internet connection at home?

Some of the problems may be where I live. I am in the country, where many of my neighbors are cows and horses. Yes, there are also alpacas living nearby. Until recently, I had an alarm set on my phone to bring in the bird feeders before 9 PM. A few days a week, I would see black bears checking out my birdfeeder area, along with my Bearinator, a steel-reinforced 60-gallon rolling trash container.

I have a video of a bear sitting next to the trash can, his nose is even with the top of the can.

A year or so ago, one of my neighbors in the next holler, started building a garbage pile on their property. Now the bears stay on their side of the mountain and dine on garbage. While I am sad for the bears and their new dining habits, I am thankful that I do not have to bring in all the bird feeders every night. I would do this from April first, through Thanksgiving. Then the bears would hibernate, and I could leave the feeders alone during the winter months.

So, what does this have to do with technology?

Well first, I had to find a trash can that was smarter than the bears. Opening my Bearinator trash can requires two hands and an opposable thumb. The directions on how to open the can are posted on the outside of the trash can. I’m OK until the bears learn how to read.

My current frustration is with my internet service.

Over a week ago, we had a violent rainstorm. And my Star Link Satellite internet stopped working. We have had their service for 8 months and I had finally canceled my Hughes Net satellite internet and my local phone company, Bright Speed’s internet. For years we have had two internet providers. Generally, one of the two was always working.

Well, now I was faced with troubleshooting the internet issue without a backup.

And the deeper we got into troubleshooting, the less confident I became in a rapid fix. Star Link only gives support via the web. So first, I had to get where I had service to send my service ticket to them. The long and short of it was, my dish came back online but I could no longer access it. Somehow, my satellite dish was now linked to someone else’s account.

They are shipping me a new dish and have given me bill credit for a month of service.

This led me on Monday to reestablishing my landline internet connection. Thankfully I can access this very slow service month to month. Once Star Link is back online, I can decide if having a backup is worth the cost. Sadly, it may be weeks before I receive the new satellite dish. And this is mostly fine except I am having trouble with my PC switching from satellite ethernet to phone line wi-fi through a modem.

And I am having password issues which are giving me problems opening my Word documents on my laptop.

I know I know that I should be thankful that I am able to have such problems. There are many people right here in the county, who could not afford to have backup internet service. This is why $50,000,000 was given as a grant to provide high-speed internet to our rural area. They started in the town of Stanardsville, established in 1794, and have been working their way down Route 810 toward our home.

The ETA for connection is still the end of this year, but progress is being made.

And we are on the reservation list to be contacted just as soon as the service is available. I cannot wait. We are on a month-to-month with Star Link. When the system is up and running, it can be very, very fast. But when it is down, zero is zero.  Part of the issue with Star Link is that they have not officially established service in our area. We received the satellite dish and modem, with the understanding that our status would be upgraded as soon as more satellites were added to accommodate our area.

Right now, we are in their service support as “BEST EFFORT.”

Once they establish a more solid presence in our area, we will be upgraded to full service. It is possible that our current issue is related to their efforts to keep their full-service customers up and running. Our deal states that we will be automatically upgraded, at no additional cost, once the higher level of service is available.

Internet speeds with Star Link have ranged from 12 MBS to over 300.

I am told that the low end will rise to around 100 MBS once we are a full-service customer. However, even the 12 MBS is ten times faster than the average Bright speed internet performance. At least with Star Link, we almost never have buffering, which is very common with our current Bright speed landline internet.

The whole point of me thinking about this is trying to get what I am writing posted to my blog.

Next, I am going to try saving this document on a flash drive and see if I can open it on my laptop. There I have gotten the internet to work, and I can post this post. When I get it to work, I will be posting my 559^th blog post in 4 years.

These posts are helping me figure out my relationship with depression.

Perhaps I need to begin writing a blog about technology. There, like on my current blog, I can work out issues by thinking about them and writing about them. If you see this post later today, then my idea worked.