A PLEDGE FOR DSL

17 March 2003

We have long supported public TV and public radio. We are big fans of both, especially in recent years with the discovery of that marvelous game of words and whimsy, bluff and blunder, "Says You," originating in Boston, and broadcast on the local PBS radio station, KXPR, on Saturday afternoon, sandwiched in between our friend Steve Peithman's program, "Musical Stages" and before Garrison Keillor.

It's the 30 minutes of each week when Walt and I sit down and enjoy the media together. We sometimes watch TV together, but usually one of us falls asleep (these days, that would almost always be me), or he watches upstairs and I watch downstairs, or he watches in the family room and I watch in my office.

But for "Says You," we are both in the family room, our ears glued to the radio (which is an interesting sight at best).

Well, for the new season, whenever that began, KXPR moved Steve's show to God knows when, and took off 'Says You'!! We were outraged. There went family togetherness, down the tubes.

But I checked the Internet and discovered that I could pick up the show at 4 p.m. on Sunday on the San Francisco PBS station, KQED. The first week Walt cleared away a tiny spot in my cluttered office, perched on the edge of a chair, and the two of us sat here listening to the program.

By the following week I'd taught him how to get KQED on his own computer and he listened to it upstairs while I listened downstairs.

Today he was at the office, preparing for a business trip he's taking this week and at 4 p.m. he came in to tell me he'd be sitting out in the car until 4:30. See, we can get KQED radio on the car radio, but it doesn't come in on the house radio, and he didn't have time to boot up his computer to get it there.

I had been home all afternoon and for the previous 10 minutes had been trying to get KQED. I am a victim of slow internet connection...and bad browsers.

I stopped using Internet Explorer several months ago because it was slow as molasses in January and when I discovered that Opera was not only faster than any other browers I'd tried, but also had the option of suppressing pop-up ads, I was sold. So I've been using Opera for months now, mostly happily.

Unfortunately, it does have some glitches, mostly around java sites. Though it is java enabled and though I have the latest version, for some reason there are some java links that it just ignores.

And it doesn't like Internet radio.

So when I discovered that I could get "Says You" on the Internet, I had to do it with Internet Explorer, which worked just fine for the first two weeks.

Today my computer has been acting squirrely. Probably because I've been doing about 14 things at once all day, switching from graphics to slide shows to music to text and interchangeably back and forth. I've had to reboot many times (dontcha love Windows-ME?). It likes to stall when I am running a WordPerfect macro, for instance, which is about 90% of what I use for transcription. There have been points where it was "type a paragraph - reboot - type another paragraph - reboot." It's not usually like that, but I was just overloading the system today.

But I was aware that "Says You" was coming on and left--I thought--enough time to get connected. Only I was too impatient and couldn't wait for it to connect itself, but I had to nudge it by starting "Real One" manually.

Well, my computer didn't like that, and it jammed again. "!#!$!%!$," I said, eloquently.