One thing about living in a big city, or near one, is the availability of things that are up and coming. Take the internet for example. I know a lot of people in my hometown who are still on dial-up. Well yesterday I got the newest offering put into my home. That is fiber optic service. Verizon is offering its FIOS internet in my area as a test market. I am now getting 15 mps download and 2 mps upload. For you lay people that is 20 times faster than normal DSL and 300 times faster than a normal dialup connection, all at the same price as DSL. I took the day off yesterday while they were installing it. I was able to watch a movie from movielink.com after 5 seconds of buffering. It took less than 10 minutes to download the 800 mb file at 6 meg a second. I was also able to download a Star Wars fanfilm in 10 minutes that took a normal lan 8 hours. This all brings up the classic online addiction talk. There is a new culture emerging where all guys want to do is play games in a virtual world. But it can also effect girls as well. Back in college there was this one girl who I went out with who became an AOL hacker. She had guys sending her plane tickets and she actually went without ever having met them. I've heard of couples breaking up over internet addiction. My sister used to have a couple living next to her and eventually it became just the wife and a familiar IM message beep heard every 30 seconds. The fact that she kept the window open let the whole neighborhood know when she was getting an IM. When Star Wars Galaxies first came out I took the day off and then proceeded to get my coworkers addicted. Since I was single it was ok, but they had wives and girlfriends and apparently the game became a way of escape. Although after a couple of weeks I lost interest. Thank God for my short attention span, otherwise I'd be 400 pounds and stuck on my couch still playing games. In other news, even after getting a fast connection, the internet still looks the same.

Thought of the Day
"To cover my nervousness, I started eating an apple because I think if they hear you chewing on the other end of the phone, it make you sound casual."
"Yeah, like a farm boy."
- George and Jerry, in "The Phone Message"