How cool is this? I'm now surfing via the AT&T digital cable link! In style.

[For a benchmark, Bitsacpe tries downloading Mozilla. And it finishes before typing the rest of that last sentence. Average transfer rate: 398.30 kB/s.]

Yeeeeeehaaaaw!

Received a knock on the door a half hour ago. I knew it would either be the cable tv installation (also expected to show up sometime this morning), or the broadband. It was broadband guys. Two of them.

I showed them to my computer. The "lead" guy asked if he could perform a few routine sanity checks before beginning. I moved the mouse, which unblanked the screen. He stared blankly for a few seconds, and said, "This is Linux, right?"

Me: "Yep."

"I won't be able to set this end of it up for you then."

"That's fine with me. I've already got an ethernet card, and I can configure the computer, all you need to do is get a connection I can plug into, and I'll worry about configuring the computer."

He was cool with that. Immediately, he and his partner set to work wiring test equipment up to the jack in the wall, getting on the cell phone with headquarters for info, and writing down gobs of info on a little form. He gave me the service agreement to sign as they wired up the modem.

After that was connected, he handed me a sheet of paper with my IP, router, dns, and mail server info (he said I could also get it via dhcp, but they virtually never change the addresses, so I could hardcode the IP if I wanted to), some instructions books, a cd (which he figured I probably wouldn't have any need for), and another sheet of paper to sign stating that the installation had been performed.

And that was it. According to my copy of the sheet, a grand total of 25 minutes between initial arrival and departure. Actually, a much more efficient and professional job than I remember having with the Covad guy back at the Louisville Compound (not to say the Covad guy was bad, but this... wow!)

And now I'm online, with bandwidth galore!

Sometime within the next 2.5 hours, I expect the AT&T cable tv installer to show up. This is rockin! I love this place!