The State of the Internet at Hale Manoa

This is a State of the Internet address I made by e-mail to the East-West Center participants in late 2005 in response to a number of people on the listserv complaining about the slow internet connection. If you don’t know what the East-West Center is and never lived in Hale Manoa nor faced the wrath of the quarter nazi at the front desk, you might want pass on this one. However if you love your irony thick and juicy, and for some strange reason actually enjoy my twisted sense of humor, then go ahead and have a skim.

Dear fellow EWC participants and friends,

Yes, the Internet connection here is slow. Very slow. In fact, I’ve had faster connections than this using the Internet on 10-year-old computers in a little shack in the middle of the jungle in Bumblefuk, China (if you don’t know where that is, it’s about 3000 miles west of Beijing, next to a big river and some mountains). The computers were powered by little hamsters that ran around a little wheel connected to a generator. Sometimes the hamsters would get tired and I’d have to run around the wheel myself to keep the computer on. And I don’t even know how the computers were connected to the Internet, but I could still check my e-mail and sell pirated DVDs on Ebay faster than I can here.

Anyway, my point is that Bob is right. The connection here is miserably slow. In fact, Wilmar was just telling me today that it takes him twice as long to ‘download pictures’ (he didn’t specify exactly what kind of pictures he was downloading) from American web sites here in Hawaii than it does from a computer back home in Indonesia. That’s just not a good sign folks. And for the rest of us who actually use the Internet for more important things than just ‘browsing images’ like Wilmar, it can be extremely frustrating to wait 20 minutes for that new Britney Spears MP3 to download or several days for the newest Star Wars movie to download to your computer. I mean what good is that $400 iPod if it takes three years to download enough pirated content to fill up all 60 Gigabytes?!!

So what’s causing this problem folks? Is Housing intentionally trying to curb our addiction to free content on the Internet? Is it a conspiracy to keep us from accessing all but EWC-sponsored information (notice the EWC web sites all load very quickly and without fail!)? Is it because 99.9% of the bandwidth is reserved for the staff at Burns Hall (ever notice how they never complain about slow connections over there… Mendl’s always bragging about how she can download 10 movies an hour!)? No folks. I think Housing and the EWC have the best of intentions. They want us to have fast Internet. They want us to reach out to the world from our computers. They want us to be on the Information Superhighway just like those hamsters in Bumblefuk, China. It’s just that they are too busy with other ‘vital upgrades’ to worry about upgrading the network infrastructure. I mean hey, didn’t you notice that nice new blue checkered carpet in the elevator lobby at Hale Manoa?! Yes, it looks just like the old carpet, but many of you probably didn’t realize that the old carpet had TWO STAINS ON IT! GROSS! And did anyone notice that the change machine in the vending machine room is fixed? That’s right, when I need to do my laundry and don’t have any quarters, I no longer have to bravely approach the quarter Nazi at the front desk and beg and beg just to get $3 in quarters like I did last semester. Oh no, I can go straight to the change machine, stick in AS MANY $5 bills as I want, and get enough change to wash my clothes for an entire semester. Then I can laugh at the quarter Nazi at the front desk as I walk by with my pockets bulging with shiny new quarters. And Housing tells me that they have ALMOST purchased (after two semesters) new can openers for the kitchens. Evidently they have been trying to buy some cheap ones on Ebay for the past year, but they said every time they were ready to make the final bid, their Internet connection was too slow and the auction would be over before the webpage finished loading.

So you see, there are much more vital issues to consider here than our Internet access. And I really can’t complain, seeing as how just two years ago we only had DIAL-UP CONNECTIONS from our rooms (yes, new participants, I jest not… it wasn’t until 2004 that this building, the main dorm of a federally funded institute, got Internet connections in the rooms). So every time I wanted to check my e-mail, I would have to unplug the phone, plug in the modem, call the 28.8Kbps UH dial-up connection, wait 30 minutes to connect to one of only 50 modem connections for a university with over 10,000 commuting students (i.e. lots of people using the dial-up connection), and then wait an additional 10 minutes for my e-mail to load. Then when I finally got my e-mail open, there wouldn’t even be any messages for me, so I would just sit at my computer and cry for 20 more minutes. So basically, every time I checked my e-mail, it took me an hour. And remember that the entire time you were connected, you couldn’t receive phone calls. One time my friend told me she was coming to pick me up, and that she would call me when she arrived. We were going to get food because she said she was really hungry. So I waited 15 minutes and she didn’t call. I was bored, so I decided to check my e-mail. Yeah, I kinda forgot that would block my phone line. An hour later, when I was finished crying because nobody had sent me any e-mails and I had wasted all that time for nothing, I disconnected my computer and plugged the phone back in. A few minutes later I got a phone call. It was my friend. She said she’d been waiting downstairs for a VERY long time. She said she was REALLY hungry. And for some reason she sounded EXTREMELY angry. I don’t know why. I guess maybe the quarter Nazi at the front desk had said something mean to her. Anyway, that friend left for California the next day, and she never e-mailed me after that. Which meant I spent even more time crying at my computer that semester.

So what I’m trying to say is this… oh, actually I forgot what I wanted to say. Anyway, the Internet connection is slow and I’m not sure if there is much we can do about it. Maybe we can ask Wilmar to stop downloading so many ‘pictures’, or maybe we should all cut back on our non-academic Internet pursuits, or maybe we should all get together one day and have a 400-person march on Burns Hall and burn it to the ground if they don’t agree to share some of their bandwidth with us. Or, for the more technically inclined people out there, I hear you can turn your cooking wok into a homemade satellite dish. Just cut a hole in the bottom, stick one of those little USB wireless adapters in the middle, point it toward the UH campus, and you can pick up the UH wireless signal pretty well. But I’d rather keep my wok for cooking and just wait a few extra minutes for my e-mail to download.

I would love to have faster Internet here. I would love to help anyone interested in approaching Housing about improving our connection. I would REALLY love to organize the 400-man march on Burns Hall. But most likely Housing (or whoever is in charge of the network here) has more important things to worry about. After all, I hear next week they will begin replacing the grass in Friendship Circle. They said it’s not green enough.

I forgot why I started writing this e-mail. Anyway, I’m sorry it’s so long, because it will probably take you 30 minutes to download it. But while you are waiting for it to finish downloading, you can start preparing your torch for the march I’m organizing. Time and date to be announced. Let’s get those bandwidth hogs!

I sure hope this e-mail doesn’t take as long to send as it took to write…

Jay