Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Before my nap, I decided to try to find the answer to the question, "Can I get DSL without also continuing to pay for POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service)?" And I discovered that there's a name for this, "dry DSL" or "unshared DSL". I also found that it won't solve my problem. *sigh*

The reason I do not have broadband is that I'm poor. The cheapest way for me to connect to the Internet is a POTS line and a 56K modem. But I'd like broadband, and from what I've seen it's probably worth the money, so it's really just the cost that's holding me back. (A one-time fee would be different; "will I be able to afford this every month?" rather scares me right now. It's that not-having-a-regular-paycheck thing.) Since my phone line is only used by the modem, another type of connection might be feasible if it's cheap enough and lets me drop the phone line. Last I checked, cable service within the city did not include broadband, so switching to a cablemodem won't work here (and I'd still have to verify that Comcast could set me up with a cablemodem without my having to by cable television service as well.) I've seen ads for DSL costing roughly as much as a basic telephone line, but if that cost is in addition to the basic telephone service, it's a luxury I from which I should refrain.

Well I found dry DSL service. But it costs more than shared DSL. It's less than the cost of shared DSL plus the phone line, but still too much of an increase for me to call it fiscally responsible. *sigh* And the really cheap DSL providers don't do dry DSL at all, it seems (though if I can get that "compare prices of all providers that can reach you on one page" web site to actually display results, maybe I'll find one I didn't know about).

But just in case farther research uncovers something surprisingly inexpensive ... Are any of you using really low-budget DSL and finding it satisfactory? Are any of you using really low-budget phone service and finding it satisfactory? (I'm currently getting telephone service from Talk America (though Verizon still owns the copper, of course), and am interested in saving more money if I can, whether I wind up with DSL or not.) Any companies I should cross off the list right off the bat?

It's been suggested that I try to rig a Pringles-can antenna to hook into the free wireless at the Inner Harbour, but a couple of buildings in the way spare the temptation to find out whether the city would consider that abuse if I were caught. (If they'd put the antenna on the World Trade Center, it'd be line-of-sight from my 2nd-floor roof, but they put it on the Science Center instead.)

"I have let a furred Godzilla into my home." -- J. Michael Straczynski, on discovering that the kitten he rescued from drainage pipes turned out to be half Main coon cat. (Heartwarming story, cool photo of kitten running.)

A week or so ago I was thinking in the shower (thoughts seem especially slippery then) about tenses. Specifically, I was thinking about how bothering to learn (as a child, I hope) seemingly nitpicky things like the nuances of the perfect and pluperfect tenses leads to the ability to convey and understand fine shadings of meaning concisely. Now that's a pretty ordinary thought, but when I soaped the idea up, this emerged from the lather:

I started wondering about communication in language that lack such distinctions in tense -- I don't know what languages do, but I imagine there must be some (other than pidgins and creoles which, IF I understand correctly, often start out with a stripped-down set of tenses and wind up inventing most of the missing ones that the sources languages had in a non-standard form later ...?) But that's where the slipperiness of shower thoughts comes in, because that led to wondering ...

... whether people who write in languages that lack that specificity of tense find it easier or harder to write dialogue for time-travel stories than English-speakers (and, I'm guessing, other Romance (Latin-based) and Greek-influenced languages) do. There is, after all, that whole subjective/objective timestream issue regarding tenses, which gets even worse when a character loops on herself.

I also wondered what tenses English is missing that other languages have.

I'd been meaning to post this for a while, but was just reminded of it after I commented on a mailing list about how much confusion could've been avoided if "inflammable" had just been spelled "enflammable" from the get-go, and then added a silly request for a time-machine repairman.