It’s amazing how remote all things internet get when the internet is not at your fingertips. I moved to my home town in Russia for the time being, and now I don’t have the kind of access to the internet that I’ve became accustomed to. I am back to the internet as luxury from being used to having it as commodity. I am back to dialup at 44kbps, that’s what my laptop’s modem gives me.

Even though it’s dialup it’s not cheap, so I can’t spend as much time online as I would like. So I am changing my internet usage patterns. Downloading all email to my notebook from Yahoo! Mail and Gmail instead of reading it online. Writing emails offline, and then sending them all at once when I am online again.

Oh, and now blogs. Blogs are such pain in the ass, pardon my french. I simply don’t have the time online to read them, and that hurts a lot. I am using the R|Mail blog to email service now to get all blog entries in my email that is downloaded to my notebook, and then I read it all offline. Still, it’s not perfect at all. A blog entry in full is a rare species. Usually it’s a thing with a “more” link that you have to click on to read the complete entry. So the rest of the entry does not make it to my email. Oh well. I think you can feel my frustration now.

ADSL option is available where I stay, but it’s not cheap either. It’s $40-$45 for 64kbps link and 1Gb of incoming traffic, or $75 for 2Gb of incoming traffic. Outgoing traffic is not counted. You pay hefty installation fee and the cost of two ADSL modems, and in a little while you’re all set. Only it seems that I use about 10mb per hour while browsing or downloading my email on dialup, which gives me… about 100 hours of browsing before I run out of my prepaid ADSL traffic allotment. Forget about downloading something interesting.

I get nearly everything I used to read online in my mailbox now, with the exception of few forums that don’t have the RSS support. Another excepion is the wiki that I maintain. Often than not I have to go out and read the blog entries in full while online. That’s how I burn my dialup minutes at disturbing speeds. Everything moves fast on the internet, and I do need to know of happenings earlier, not later. Anyhow, it’s a very different setting from what I used to have in the States, but I’m getting used to this all. It will work out, eventually.

One thing I understand better now is why and how many people here don’t have that feel of the internet and its surroundings that inspires me and other people with new ideas and killer applications. They simply don’t feel the pulse of the internet.