Saturday, January 19, 2008

5:28 PM | Suddenly Offline

I already said I was sorry for the silence of the past few weeks. It seems that the whole of Dumaguete is afflicted with the strange status of being terribly offline, catching all of us off-guard: Globelines, we've learned, is suffering from some sort of slowdown, rendering Internet surfing to a suffering crawl. Imagine the panic. Imagine the work not being done. Imagine not being able to email or blog in two, three weeks. Imagine the helpless text messages between friends asking and advising each other where they could possibly find a good wifi. ("Don Atilano," I tell them, "but if there's nothing, Cafe Noriter is a good bet.")

I'm in Noriter right now, sipping my cafe latte, Beatles songs blaring in the background, pounding on my MacBook like an addict long deprived of Internet nourishment. Cafe Noriter is a new, quaint hangout for the city's college kids and laptop crowd along Avenida Sta. Catalina -- done in a manner of tasteful Korean kitsch that somehow works and somehow transcends to a kind of charm. And the coffee is good. Cafe Noriter is owned by a Korean guy and his beautiful wife who used to be some sort of popular model in Seoul. "I'm not going back to Korea," she told Mark last week during a television interview, "I love Dumaguete too much."

I've made plans with Annabelle to surf here Sunday with her. The Internet back home simply will never do anymore. Imagine having to load a simple webpage, only to have it take more than an hour to load fully. (That is if you don't get an instant message that "server is down.") Annabelle gave me a newsbit a few hours ago that the company's cable connections were severed for some strange reasons somewhere in the waters near Romblon -- but there is no official word yet. Globelines, instead, pretends nothing is happening. When I went to the headquarters to complain more than a week ago, I was told there was absolutely nothing wrong, that I probably had a virus (they're blaming me?), but that they would send a technician as soon as possible (who never came, anyway). Drat them.

Speaking of laptops, I have promised I shall do my MacBook the honor of not having to be corrupted by my insistent use of Windows XP anymore. My laptop, you see, has dual environments -- but years of having become used to Microsoft's decidedly unsexy OS left me merely admiring Mac OS, but still intimidated by the new interface, the new ways of navigating through unfamiliar applications. But enough. I'm slowly weaning myself away from that old MS world, to embrace this sleek new one. And have you see the new MacAir? Isn't it beautiful? Sigh.

Labels: blogging, dumaguete, life, web and tech

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

---

GO TO OLDER POSTS GO TO NEWER POSTS