My New Desk, Phone, Bob, and The Halloween Party

Today I woke up and started working at my new desk with my new wireless access point in place. The new desk sort of solves my posture problem, but doesn't change the fact that my Internet is sooo slow.

I ended up chatting with my friend Lukas, trying to figure out how I can get my work done faster. The speed of the Internet has put a serious damped on my productivity, and it seems like I'm endlessly waiting around for files to save. I am way too impatient for that, as I'm sure any web developer would be and the waiting is just excruciating.

I modified my software to stop using SSL, VPN, text editor.. trying to eliminate anything causing additional overhead. We made it better, but it was still slow. I just didn't quite understand because my transfer rates weren't that bad. Then Lukas pointed out that maybe it was due to latency issues. Round trip pings to Google average at about 1000ms. That seriously sucks. If a page contains 10 elements, for the request for each element to go through, it takes like 10 seconds to load a page. Excruciating!

After I spent most of the day trying to code 1 feature, I ended up taking a drive to Surf Da Web so I could test their connection. So far, I hadn't found anything decent on the island. So I paid $3 for 15 minutes just so I could surf to a couples sites and check the speeds. Lo and behold it was amazingly fast! Obviously this was the place to be. So I had a couple options now. I could pay to sit at their desk at Surf Da Web which is about $75 a day, or I could pay to use their wireless which is about $50 a month, but I would need to find a place to sit, or.. I could try something more clever.

The guy who owns Surf Da Web is William Culver. He's currently on his honeymoon but he should be back soon. I want to ask him if he can set me up with some pimp internet service at my house, or if I can rent a desk in his office from him. They have a lighting fast T1 and that's what I really need. This could be the thing that I'm looking for. Well, I know they have what I want, now I just have to find a way to smooth our the details.

After that, I was going to go to the beach, but it was raining really hard and I overheard some people saying that downtown was filled with traffic from people attempting to get up the big hills in their cars but failing. So I ended up driving away from town, but instead of imediatly going home, I drove down to Chocolate Hole so I could sit by the beach and maybe go snorkeling.

When I got there I met this dude named Bob. We ended up chatting about the island, its history, politics, boats, himself, myself, and he was kind enough to give me a couple of his beers. After talking with Bob a while, I realized that he was a very intelligent guy with an interesting and seemingly successful past. He also offered to let me come check out his house and test the internet there. He was also willing to let me work there if I found the connection to be sufficient.

So I ended up following Bob to his house in my new Suzuki. He lived atop a hillside in a very nice house with an awesome view. He had a retriever named Bo who was playing with a tennis ball when I got there. I followed Bob inside and he pointed to his laptop and allowed me to check it out. Instantly I realized that his Internet was definitely faster than mine.

We sat and chatted for a while. I had been gone about two hours and I knew Tracy was waiting for me. Bob then got a call from his son who needed a ride. He have me his telephone number and said to call if I needed to use his internet. I was definitely nice to meet him, and I'd like to find other reasons to hang out with him other than usurping his internet.

I drove back to the house where Tracy and I discussed going to the Halloween party at Happy Fish in the Marketplace. Tracy put on her beautiful hand-made green princess costume and we headed to Happy Fish at about 7:30pm. When we got there they told us the party started at 10pm, so we drove downtown and hung out at the Beach Bar to kill some time.

We ended up hanging with these two cool dudes, Dominic and David from Baltimore. They were visiting staying in David's timeshare. We also met this guy named Zach who was there with a wedding party. The wedding party was being all loud and rowdy. Tracy, Dominic, David, and I ended up playing trivial pursuit with the cards on the bar.

At about 10pm we headed over to Happy Fish, ordered some $2.50 Heinekens. Phoebe's ex-boyfriend Greg was playing with a band there. We met a lot of cool people in some great costumes. We even met our neighbors Mike & Terry whom we had not met before. It was raining pretty hard all night while we were on the covered balcony. At about 1:30pm we drove home, cooked up a pizza, chowed, and went to bed.

It was a great day despite me still wanting to strangle the Internet until it's dead corpse lay twitching on the floor. At points during the day I even entertained fantasied of leaving the island, thinking I had made a terrible decision and a great misjudgment. But in the end, it still seems like I had a couple more options to check out. I also got our local phone working today, so now I can at least have conference calls without interruption or VoIP distortion.