Ana Can Haz Internetz...

Growing up, I think my mother thought that chicks got screwed in a lot of life. Because of that she trained her daughters to be independent, assertive, and self-reliant.

Today, I am kick-ass at a lot of things, but two areas plague me. I have difficulty reaching objects in high places, and I suck at technology.

The first drawback makes sense given my midget status, but the second failure always draws a blank for me. I love taking things apart and putting them back together. I know how to change a tire, change a car battery, and at one point, knew how to change the oil, but gadgets? Ick, it takes me forever to adopt them and love them.

Take for example:
My (first and only) stereo – it was given to me by my father in 1991;
My (first and only) TV – purchased by my father in 1997 after my boyfriend always wanted to watch movies at his stinky apartment where he lived with several roommates;
My (first and only) VCR – inherited in 1998 during the division of items when the boyfriend (by now a live-in) and I broke up;
My (first and only) DVD player – given to me by my brother for Xmas in approximately 2000…after he gave me a DVD in 1999 and I failed to purchase a player for it;
My (first and only) Computer/laptop – given to me by my mother in 2004…because I was writing my law school applications at work. (Sadly, my Stinkpad has now passed on. A moment of silence, please.)
My (first and only) ipod – won in a drawing in 2008.
My (first and only) blackberry – forced on me by work in 2009 after receiving my promotion. I still don’t know how to use it except to check college football scores on ESPN during the weekends.

There is absolutely no excuse for any of this. During childhood, we were the first people on the block to own a VCR (1977?), a Pong (1979), a personal computer (1981), and every other technological whiz-bang that my dad paid three times as much for as the person who bought it the next year.

To add insult to injury, my father worked at IBM for thirty years of my life, and my little sister works at that “little” software company in Seattle that starts with an M.

About the only technological thing I have ever been good at is the internet. Back when the information highway was just a babe and Mosaic was the browser of choice, I petitioned the Graduate School of Library Sciences to take an internet class because it was the only department in all of UTexas that offered a course. One of my first jobs out of college was sitting at a computer all day collecting information about people from online sources. To this day, it’s amazing what I can dig up on someone in fifteen minutes or less. This is why there’s only one site on the internet that carries my real name. I mean sure, there are other sites with *my* name, but that’s another person. You’ll only find the real me at austinchronicle.com.

I love the internet. I have trouble functioning without it, and why the move to my new apartment has been so difficult. The internet SUCKed here. And every day, I swear it got worse, until a few days ago when I couldn't even load my gmail. I did everything to try and figure out what was wrong. When I finally tested my internet speed do you know what it told me? After several failed attempts where the darn thing timed out, I learned that my download speed was somewhere between 37-150 kbps. Now I may be technologically retarded, but I do know the unit system, and my wireless router (given to me by my father in 2005 when he purchased a new one) could handle transfers of 11 mbps, and why in the heck would you need that much for....okay, I'm too tired to work out the decimals here, but you know what I mean. .037 mbps? .150 mbps? Is that right?

Sad. So sad. So I gave up, gave in, and finally called my Internet Service Provider. (Actually, I contacted them online via chat while at work so I wouldn’t actually have to talk to anyone.) After about an hour’s worth of baloney, they finally decided that *I* was not the problem, and today a technician came out to check the line.

A few whirs and clicks later, and voila, a speed test revealed a download rate of 22,000 kbps. I know. That still probably sucks, but I think it's awesome. I mean, I can load my email now.

I vaguely considered asking the technician if he wanted to make out because, for a solid sixty seconds I was actually in love with the guy, but I needed to get back to work.

I can’t remember the last time I was this happy. It's like when you haven't dated anybody for ages and finally get laid.