Free, free, free!!

Just wanted to drop in and let you know that I’m finally a real person… I have an internet connection!!! There are some issues with the wifi, but in my 10 square meters, I think I can handle using the ethernet cord while waiting for the wifi to become operational.

It’s fast, too – not as fast as they claim, of course, but faster than my connection was at the rue de Paradis – four times faster. AND I have TV, they tell me – we’ll see if the cute little box that gave me two and a half channels through the rabbit ears can actually dialog with its digital friend. There’s a hard drive that will let me record any program I want to watch later. I know that most of you are thinking “duh, what do you think WE’VE been doing all this time?” But I haven’t… my last subscription was with cable, and they weren’t quite as “with it”.

For the moment, Free’s technical assistance has been stellar… A phone call to figure out my internet access codes gave me immediate satisfaction, and this morning at 8 am when I needed some help getting the wifi going, I chatted live with someone who answered my questions politely (and without TOO many spelling errors…) So far, so good – I’m much happier with Free (at this early stage) than I ever was with Noos / Numéricable.

The best thing about all this is how cheap it is – half as much as I had been paying, for four times the speed and many more cool options, like wifi hotspots all over the city that I can access for free for as long as I want.

So now I can hear you thinking: “Great… now she’ll NEVER get off the computer!” But that’s not quite true. It takes me two seconds to do things that used to take hours, when I was using the public access – because it kept cutting out on me, and when it WAS there, it was mortally slow. So now I’ll just be able to do my thing and get on with life. I spent hours sitting here sending my life force into the wifi connection just hoping to keep it going… But now I feel motivated to get up and do the dishes, just knowing that when I get back to the Mac, I can get online again if I want to!

Heh, heh. Things are getting better here in the aerie.