Unexpectedly this morning our ADSL at home got shaped — that is, slowed down to more-or-less dialup speed because we’d used all our bandwidth for the month. Fortunately it’s not the calendar month — it’s the month up until the 21st.

I could blame the excessive use of YouTube in the house, but ultimately it’s probably due to torrents of Sports Night, the Aaron Sorkin series from 1998 (pre-West Wing) which appears to be pretty much unattainable otherwise, and is the only TV show I’ve ever encountered with three characters named the same as people in my immediate family: Daniel, Isaac and Jeremy. (We don’t have any people called Casey, Dana or Natalie in our family however.)

It’s been something like 8 years since I’ve had to use dialup from home (apart from a short period after moving in 2003). While I could wail and moan about it. In fact I could easily buy a Data Block to see us back on broadband until the end of the billing period.

But in fact it’s a little like what apparently happened in Seattle recently when they shut down a third of a major freeway for construction works. People used it less, and the traffic just vanished.

I reckon we could do without YouTube for a few days.

“Computer people are the last to guess what’s coming next. I mean, come on, they’re so astonished by the fact that the year 1999 is going to be followed by the year 2000 that it’s costing us billions to prepare for it.”
– Douglas Adams, 1999 — Cited by Stephen Fry

I was recently remarking to my mate Brian that it was he who first introduced me to the concepts of eBay and portable music players (eg iPod).

I recall him years ago describing the iRiver player he was covetting — and eventually bought, if my memory serves me correctly.

And I remember him describing this new online auctioning system. People would list their items, others would bid, a small fee would go to the auction company, and everybody would be happy. It was called “eBay”.

Brian was always an early adapter, and I hadn’t heard of these things, and neither had most of the general public.

In both these cases I my response was to think “What a stupid name. And what a stupid idea.”

And I thought Gmail was a hoax.

I guess I’m not very good at predicting technology trends.