Broadband in the Boonies 2022

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Not that I expect you to keep track, but were the very first Broadband in the Boonies missive to take on human form, it could legally purchase alcoholic beverages in these 50 united states. Indeed, on or about February 28, 2001, I detailed what it was like to live with the now defunct (and may it rot in hell) StarBand satellite broadband system (domain name for sale, btw).

In later years (now lost to time and Macworld’s spotty archives), I exulted in DSL finally coming to my rural valley, allowing me to ditch the wretched dish bolted to my home. And I was happy, believing that this was just the first step in a future swollen with viable broadband.

As it turns out, that first step has lasted 16 very long, very frustrating years.

With fingers firmly crossed, I think I can say that step is finally complete.

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Broadband in the Boonies, Holiday Edition

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Dear Santa,

You so delivered on last year’s wish list—no cancer recurrence, continued employment during a challenging pandemic, and virtually no COVID among family and friends—that I feel almost sheepish for making yet one more request before the year’s end. But as you’re in the request business, here goes:

Could I please have my broadband back sometime before 2022?

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The journey—one year on

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Dear Chris,

Hi, it’s me, your future self, one year from today. I know you’re going under the knife this morning to finally get that cancer out of your throat. And, as I recall, you’re a little concerned about what the future holds.

I can’t tell you how the “you’re probably out of the woods” two-year plan goes because we’re not there yet, but we’re halfway, cancer-free, and alive enough for me to compose this message to you.

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Broadband in the Boonies 2021

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When we last met to discuss broadband in rural areas, AT&T had jerked back its leased circuit from my then-current ISP and taken its sweet time providing its own service. After weeks of calls and promised-but-not-delivered truck rolls, the correct modem lights finally lit up and I was back on the Internet. In the two years since then we’ve had (are having) a pandemic, life has shifted to home, and each of us has grown to appreciate just how important a reliable broadband connection is.

Lately, some of us are appreciating—as in understanding rather than enjoying—how expensive and frustrating that connection can be.

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Journey's end

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If you follow U.S. politics, you know the most recent Presidential election was wrenching—months of bitter campaigning, the worst sorts of people spewing lies and hate, and no real sense of resolution because of one man’s metastatic ego. Given how invested I and those with similar views were in making that guy a one-term President, you’d think we’d feel a greater sense of jubilation when the votes were finally tallied.

Rather than having a sense of triumph and positivity, I felt tired and let down. And I wasn’t alone. My friends who were most invested in the election’s outcome had the keenest feelings of disappointment. What do we do with the energy we’ve generated all these months now that it’s all over? What happens next? Have our efforts made a difference, or is this just a brief respite before the next cluster of American authoritarianism corrupts the body politic?

And so maybe you can understand that when my last meeting with the medical team ended with an abrupt We Think You’re Cured But We’ll Keep Checking, I left with mixed feelings. The bad thing is gone, but is it gone for good?

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An unexpected development

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When I was 50 I had what is known in the business as a Big Surgery. It dealt with the issue I had, but recovery did not go well. Far from blaming the surgeon for my problems, we became friends. And after we became friends he shared this bit of surgeonly wisdom with me:

“The reality of surgery, Chris, is that we cut you and then wait to see what happens.”

I can see the switchboard light up with angry calls from surgeons worldwide, so please allow me to interpret. Obviously, there’s a lot more to surgery than the employment of sharpened tools and patience. What surgeon friend was referring to is recovery.

You can perform the same surgery on two patients who match the same profile, and one’s recovery can be wholly different from another’s. Or as Robert Burns so aptly put it: The best laid schemes o' Patients an' Surgeons, Gang aft agley.

And agley is exactly what happened to my treatment plan after surgery.

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Healing at home

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And so began the home stretch on my road to recovery. On the plus side, my bed, my family, my media, my toys, uninterrupted sleep, and the support of my friends. In the minus column, no ability to get a breakout narcotic squirted through an IV when pain hit the 7 to 8 mark.

Broadly, next steps were along these lines:

  • Recover for four weeks

  • Take on calories

  • Get calibrated to Stanford’s radiation gadgetry

  • Wait another week

  • Radiation treatment, five days a week for six weeks

  • Recover for one to two months

  • Back to work, slacker

I had a lot of time to kill.

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Pain management and puddings

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I suspect that for most people, the first couple of days of hospital recovery are largely a blur. You’re doped up and constantly interrupted for one thing or another—let’s take your vital signs, let’s go for a walk around the ward, let’s change your sheets, let’s suggest that you suck in some deep breaths because your blood oxygen level has dipped below 90 and sets off an alarm when you’re trying to sleep, and, most frequently, let’s talk about your pain level.

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Cancer in, cancer out: surgery day

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September 29, in the blighted year of our lord, 2020. Surgery day.

After a month of appointments and preparations, I awoke at 3:00 AM to make a 5:00 AM launch at Stanford. After dousing myself in antibacterial soap for the second time in seven hours, I took the small sip of water I was allowed to choke down my morning medications and, with otherwise empty stomach, set off for the hospital. In hindsight, I was surprisingly calm as I was more concerned about removing the cancer than how it was done.

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Make way for robots

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Though I can’t swear to it, I’m pretty sure that any physician tasked with telling a patient that they have cancer is trained, early on, to avoid opening with, “Dude, you are so screwed.” So it wasn’t too surprising that after the first doctor to scope my throat told me that he found what he suspected was a tumor on the back of my tongue, he quickly followed up with “No one wants to hear that, but this is really treatable and curable, and I think you’re a good candidate for surgery.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“It is. Not everyone can have surgery for this—it all depends on the size and location of the primary tumor and the number of affected lymph nodes. If it can be surgically removed, you may be able to avoid chemo and, if you’re really lucky, radiation as well. You could be one of the rare ‘one and done’ cases.”

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So, you've got cancer

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Apart from the expected mental turmoil that results from a cancer diagnosis—even a “good” one—practical concerns quickly march to the fore. Naturally, medical questions take priority in the beginning:

  • What kind of treatment will I have?

  • Who should provide it?

  • When will it start and end?

  • How long will it take to recover?

In my case, “Who should provide it?” drove everything else.

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The journey

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My family tree is fairly littered with doctors—my great grandfather, grandfather, and uncle were surgeons; my brother-in-law is an internal medicine physician; and my niece is a resident head and neck surgeon who specializes in cancers of that region. I’m pretty sure my mother, who was always eager to diagnose and prescribe for her family, also claimed a medical background to those unwary enough to take her advice at face value. So perhaps it’s not without cause that I focus overly much on my health.

On balance, health anxiety (what was once termed hypochondria) offers few rewards. There’s the resulting anxiety, which, if you’ve never experienced it, is something I wouldn’t recommend taking up in your off hours. And then there’s the reputation you earn through routine visits to your doctor for your many illusory ailments—a waste of time for the doctor and only a fleeting dose of reassurance for the afflicted.

I have discovered one benefit, however. Though any good medical professional will warn you away from the practice because it fuels rather than relieves anxiety, you develop the inclination and ability to conduct thorough research of rare diseases. Sometimes the sources of the resulting research are even reputable—websites not designed to increase your paranoia or provide testimonials from the untrained, but rather the CDC, NIH, Mayo Clinic, and international cancer centers.

I turned to these sites when something clearly wrong cropped up in my neck.

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Survival guide: How to work at home

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So. COVID-19. Pretty weird, huh? Here we are one day, concerned only with a churning political climate, the regular-old climate behaving in alarming ways, and whether it’s time to finally cut the cable, and this novel coronavirus comes out of left field.

As you’re likely aware, the virus will touch each of us and bring some measure of disruption to our lives—a greater focus on hygiene, reevaluation of travel plans, boning up on techniques for manufacturing hand sanitizer and toilet paper at home….

I can’t help much with these, but I do have a fair measure of experience with something that’s going to affect many of you: Working at home for the long haul.

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Broadband in the Boonies 2019

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Some 18 years ago, I moved from the Silicon Valley suburbs to the wilds of the California coast, and have questioned that move for not a single moment. The area is gorgeous, the natives friendly, and then there’s the beach that inspired me to take up the camera and spend time learning its workings.

If there was ever an insect in the ointment it would be the lack of broadband options. As in dearth. As in “Well, you’re the one who chose to live in a rural setting.”

At the time it proved rich fodder for a series of Macworld articles umbrellaed under “Broadband in the Boonies.” In the good old days, we country bumpkins had little more than dial-up and satellite connections to feed-in the outside world. And, considering that streaming media wasn’t yet really a thing, it was annoying, but hardly intolerable. And surely, with time, conditions would improve with cable, fiber, line-of-sight… anything.

And it did to the extent that a little over a decade ago, DSL was introduced to our pleasant coastal valley. Okay, it topped out at 5 megabits per second down and 640 kilobits up, but because I used a third-party provider rather than AT&T, I didn’t have to deal with a data cap. And when the connection crapped out, I could talk to a human rather than be buried in a phone tree.

And that’s the way it’s been ever since. Until now.

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The making of Broadway Noir (1 and 2)

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If you read this thing with any regularity, you know that, in my spare time, I compose and perform themes for several podcasts. Of those podcasts, the most interesting assignments come care of David J. Loehr's The Incomparable Radio Theater—an every-so-often podcast that recreates the feel of the classic radio dramas/comedies of the 30s, 40s, and 50s.

The most recent episode, "Away We Go," is the story of two cops investigating a murder in New York's Broadway theater district. For it, David asked if I could come up with something that was part "Harlem Nocturne," part "On Broadway."

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