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RewiredJanuary 05, 2009 Remember the old comic books where some villain sapped Superman's powers with green kryptonite? Or the Darkover novels where some other villain figured out a way to deprive a telepath of her psychic powers? I'm neither a telepath nor Superman, but I feel their pain -- and their profound relief and gratitude when evil is thwarted and their powers restored. In other words, I'm online again. Comcast has been and gone. There's a new little monolith on the left side of my desk. It sports a vertical row of eight green lights. The fourth from the bottom is blinking. Connectivity is restored, Morgana V is sending and receiving -- all's right with the world. To accomplish this miracle I didn't even have to sell my soul to the devil. I did have to divorce Verizon. Comcast offered a deal: high-speed Internet and digital phone service for $52/month. My monthly no-frills bill from Verizon averaged about $46/month. Verizon doesn't offer DSL in my area, FIOS isn't even on the horizon, and the dial-up speed (as I discovered to my horror shortly after I moved in) is around 21Kbps. I've got no illusions about Comcast, but it was still a no-brainer. Verizon, I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee. My relationship with my old wireless connection was love/hate. Loved it when it was working. Hated it when it funked out, which it regularly did in foul weather. Even in pretty good weather it faded in and out often enough to make listening to music or watching a video an exasperating experience. I would have divorced it, but it divorced me first. Maybe I will check out some live-streaming radio stations from far away. While the Comcast guy was here, I made a run to the West Tisbury post office to ship off the 560-page manuscript that I just finished copyediting. It was a military history of the Civil War, and it had lots and lots of names, dates, and places that needed to be verified. Webster's New Biographical and Merriam-Webster's Geographical Dictionary got a serious workout, but I still had plenty of fact-checking to do on the Web. Without an Internet connection. My straits would have been far more desperate without the generosity of two cyber-benefactors: my neighbor-landlady, Sarah, who offered the use of her laptop; and my friend Cris, she who is recuperating from hip-replacement surgery in Martha's Vineyard Hospital and made her desktop available. Since I left the Martha's Vineyard Times nearly 10 years ago, I've had very little, uh, intercourse with computers not my own. Working on other people's computers is like staying in other people's houses, where you can't find the light switches, the microwave sneers at you for your lack of sophistication, and the persistent beeping that wakes you in the middle of the night turns out to be a carbon monoxide detector. Sarah's laptop, for instance, has a touchpad instead of a mouse, and the OS is Windows Vista, with which I have almost no experience. I had no trouble accessing my Gmail account with Mozilla Firefox, but since Sarah uses Web-based e-mail exclusively her computer doesn't have an e-mail application on it. It also doesn't have Word, which I use a lot. Cris's computer has a trackball. It also has Word, and Outlook, which I'd never used but managed to figure out pretty quickly. To transfer Word files to Morgana V, I had to download them on Cris's computer, copy them to a CD-ROM, then take the CD home and feed it to Morgana V. To send a Word file I reversed the process. Yeow. Both Sarah's and Cris's desktops feature left-aligned icons in orderly columns. Orderly columns drive me nuts. My icons are scattered across my desktop, on wallpaper that features photos of Allie and Rhodry. And forget about other people's file-and-folder systems -- it's like searching through the closet of someone who doesn't wear your size and it's just as well because your sense of style is totally different. The sound you hear is me clicking my ruby slippers. Dorothy was right: traipsing off to Oz is an adventure, but there's no place like home.
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