For the duration of the Christmas break, I went back to using dial up to access the Internet.  For the sake of experimenting, I bought a prepaid Internet card worth 100 pesos.  The reason I chose this particular ISP Internet provider was because of the 6 hours free and 22 hours of Internet time.  The catch was the daily 6 hours free Internet access was between 1 am to 7 am.  When I saw this I asked myself if I’ll ever get to enjoy the free hours.

As of this writing, I haven’t availed of the free access because either I was too tired to stay up at 1 in the morning, or the free time was over by the time I was done preparing the kids for school or I was still in dreamland.

This particular ISP provider claimed on its prepaid card to providing 5x faster surfing speed.  But that was not what I experienced.  Okay, I have to give it to them that connecting with their server was easy but that was all there is to it.

The connection speed indicated 44 kbps which was not bad at all.  However, when I launched my browser, the waiting began.  It took several seconds before the default home page appeared and longer to download the Yahoo mail page.  I had to click on the Refresh button to speed things up a bit.  I immediately typed in my username and password and waited for, believe it or not, more than a minute before I reached my Inbox.  I told myself with that speed I can multitask while waiting for a page to download.

When I saw I had 101 messages I wanted to see my messages pronto.  But the connection was oh so slow I looked around the house for something to do while waiting for the page to download.  I saw some uncut pictures I had printed out from the HP Photosmart 8230 and decided to cut them while waiting.  Then I figured with the speed of download, I was wasting my money waiting.  Mid into my cutting and getting impatient with the supposedly 5x faster surfing speed, I decided to disconnect from the provider and use PLDT Vibe instead.

And I made the right decision and what a difference it was.  With the same speed at 44kbps, download time using Vibe was a lot faster and I felt I was getting value for money, and PLDT is not paying me for writing about this.  I’m just telling it the way things happened.  I’m a very busy person this days and I cannot afford to waste time just waiting for a page to download.

Thanks to Vibe’s speedy download I was able to scan all 205 emails and reply to the urgent ones rather belatedly, plus a couple more from another account all in a span of an hour and a half.  Had I stuck to the other ISP, I may not even have gotten over half of one email account.

Over the holidays I used both ISPs interchangeably and while there were times when access and download was fast with the other ISP, Vibe’s performance was consistent.  I guess this is what put Vibe on top of my dial-up provider list.

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A very good friend, kumpare and former colleague here at Manila Bulletin, Pinggot Zulueta invited me via email, one of the 101 emails I got, to attend his art exhibit which opened last December 19.  I would have loved to go but the thing is the exhibit is in New York and I don’t have the means to get there.  This is his second exhibit the first being a photo exhibit entitled Asinta: Images and Imageries which was held at the RCBC Tower in Makati in September 2002.

Pinggot’s exhibit at the Philippine Center in New York is his Aotearoa Series, a collection of paintings on canvas, rendered in oil and acrylic inspired by his impressions and reflections of life in New Zealand, which has been his home for three years now.  These artworks chronicle the artist’s emotional journey, culminating in hope and a resolve to overcome the odds. Aotearoa, which translates to “Land of the Long White Cloud”, is New Zealand’s indigenous name.  Check out the exhibit’s website at http://aotearoaseries.netfirms.com.

Congratulations Pinggot!  I know this is your best Christmas yet.

And to you my dear readers, let’s all look forward to a prosperous New Year ahead! 

God bless us all!