Sunday, February 8, 2015

I can't live without the Internet

Really, it's true. They say the first step in solving a problem is to acknowledge it. I've come to terms with it, but I admit, I have no intention of solving it whatsoever.

If you don't already know, I moved out of my old apartment the day before. 15 years in that infernal place, and you'd at least expect me to miss it. But maybe the reason I don't is because I live right next to it. Yeah, the new apartment I moved into is in the same complex. It's in a different "block" as they call it, so I need to walk across the garden whenever I go back and forth. It made carrying all my stuff from one apartment to another considerably easier, so I can't complain.

The internet connection in the new apartment hasn't been applied for yet, so I spent more than a day in the dark abyss that is Offline. Before that, while I was still in the process of moving in and moving out, I'd just sit in my old apartment whenever I wanted to use the internet for a while. Because I'm a lazy little shit, I didn't like walking all the way across just for this, and now that all my stuff had already been moved, I found little point in going there at all. A day passed before I realized that I really really needed the kick that only one thing could deliver.

My desperate little brain just then had an epiphany. Somewhere in the dark crevasses in my memory of all the technical crap I unearthed in my spare time, I remembered something,
The 802.11 specifications allowed a minimum coverage of approximately 100 metres in a straight unobstructed line through air. 
(I didn't expect my memory to actually hold, but according to this Wikipedia article, I was close enough)

I didn't know how far my old apartment's balcony was from my new one's, but I knew that 100 metres was a lot. There was only one way to find out. I went back, found the furthest balcony and kept the router right on the ledge facing the rest of the complex. I propped it up on a couple of books so that even by accident, the router would fall inside the balcony, instead of five stories down. I had some long wires, so I managed to connect the router to the ADSL modem well inside the room. After making sure everything was working fine, I crossed my fingers and went back to my new apartment.

As it turns out, I live less than a WiFi range away. Obligatory celebration dance followed. With my 12th grade board examinations starting this Monday, this is obviously very bad news for my marks.
The connection keeps dropping on my phone unless I'm standing close enough to the balcony, and it's even more unstable in my room, but like I said, as long as I have the Internet, I'll survive.

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