Online Media Cultist

Sometimes when you take a step back and think about things for a moment (a la Ferris Bueller) it makes you realize we’re living in strange times. Exciting and frantic and breathtaking and crazy times and all of the rest of it, but strange times as well.

Case in point: a shirt that displays actual wi-fi signal strength in the area via glowing bars which emit out of an image of a cell phone tower.

Yes kids, the Wi-Fi Detector Shirt is here, and can be yours for only $30.

One day I’ll have to lay it out in excruciating detail (if only for posterity), but suffice to say that for the moment my long personal nightmare seems to be over.

The Troubles began last summer. To quote myself from a piece I wrote last August called The World Gets Flatter, My Internet Gets Broker, And Google Gets More Big Brotherer:

Meanwhile, I’ve been experiencing what has been tenuously diagnosed as “intermittent connectivity issues” for more than a month now. In layman’s terms: sometimes I can access the Internet just fine from my cable broadband connection at home – and sometimes I can’t. The excruciating part is no one can seem to diagnose why I can’t, let alone fix it. This is where we get into some of the downside of the flat world: if you can’t tap in, you get left behind.

The vastly shortened version of the story: I eventually escalated matters with Charter Communications, my broadband provider, to the point where I was in personal contact with their “VP of Communications, Western Division.” This was much better, I found, than explaining over and over again to kindly but intermediate-level English speakers halfway around the globe that I can’t get a decent Internet connection. However, I realized through sleuthing out the situation that Charter was simply oversubscribed in my area and was incapable of providing me with a consistent Internet connection.

I’m an online media cultist. You take away the online part and I get right ornery.

I eventually moved onto a DSL provider called Speakeasy (they were recently acquired by Best Buy, as a matter of fact). They came highly recommended, and I was willing to pay a little bit more each month to lock in a decent connection.

Another few months of struggle ensued. The Speakeasy folks were and are way more helpful than Charter was, but they too are reliant on dispatching service reps that may or may not know what they’re doing. Multiple visits followed, culminating in a “vendor meet-up” between Covad, Speakeasy, and the local phone company that had the look and feel of a Washington-Moscow summit circa 1985.

Finally, only a slim month back, the DSL situation was resolved. It was then time to move onto the wireless network: the Holy Grail. It’s the Holy Grail because our great but tiny apartment (sometimes referred to as the Southern Fortress) shoehorns the office into our bedroom. Thus, real work gets done on the laptop in the “other room.”

This too proved to be a mini-quest of Excalibur-like proportions, but late tonight I was able to thread the needle – after calls to Speakeasy, a punch-in-the-gut $3.50/minute call to NetGear, and a run to Best Buy to pick up another wireless router – and get the network hooked up.

Now I’m on the couch, laptop sitting proudly on top of the “lapinator.” I watched The Apprentice while doing my bills, chattering and tweeting on Twitter, and cleaning up weekend e-mail.

Things are running the way I want them to for the first time since last July. Life is good. The online media cult is ready for action!