T1 is here!

Got home from work last night after an awful drive through terrible weather, debating whether to go back out to trivia and tapas at River Run, with only a few minutes before we had to get going if we were going, and a few things to do. One of them is my daily pilgrimage to check the T1 termination box for lights.

Lo and behold, lights. So I went back upstairs and grabbed my netbook, took it down, and hooked it up. Browsed. Whooosh, up comes Amazon's home page, faster than spitting.

Fairpoint isn't saying it's all done officially yet as they want to do more testing; in fact, that might happen today. So I am reluctant to unwire my Wildblue connection (since it'll be a real hassle to redo it if I have to switch back), and since I can't fit both wires up through the hole in the floor, I can't connect the T1 to my home network. So as a temporary workaround, I ran a pair of long cables, connected together, up the basement stairs and diagonally across the living room. I have to prop this cable up to keep it off the floor so my Roomba and Scooba can clean, and to ensure the dog doesn't chew on it while we're not around, but it works. There is T1-speed Internet in the cable just inches behind me right now, and everything I'm doing online has the kind of speed and responsiveness all you broadbanders take for granted.

Despite this rather amazing development, we still turned around and went out to trivia. Partially it's because I can't start doing all the official switching-over tasks until Fairpoint finishes their testing and says we're good to go, so all we could have done is sit around and try it out and say "oooooooooh!" at everything. And partially it's because we really wanted to try out River Run's new tapas menu (excellent!) and play trivia. (We kept up our team winning streak by tying for the win, and I feel good about being the only person in the place to get the "what's the common theme of these five songs?" question.)

I haven't started doing things that were formerly impossible, as I've been busy with my usual Friday things, but I have been reveling in how responsive everything is. Wheeeeee!