Weather Conditions Affects My Blogging

The beautiful sunny, warm spring days beckon me outdoors which really provides me with more blog fodder.  The weather conditions though can often be quite detrimental preventing me from blogging online often for as much as a couple of hours at a time and sometimes longer.  The only highspeed [sic] internet service available to us is satellite because of our rural location.  The speeds are impressive at up to 512 Kbps (12.8x faster than dial-up) and upload up to 128 Kbps.  We pay $49.99 plus taxes per month for this service that they only have to give you 40% of what they promise.  The only other available package available would give us 1 Mbps (25x faster than dial-up) download but the same upload for $79.99 plus taxes per month. Note my sarcasm here.  Satellite internet is most discouraging because when we aren't getting FAPed (throttled down to the speed of dial-up for the remainder of the hour) the signal can easily be disrupted if a mosquito flies through the beam!  Just imagine what a big, bad rain cloud is capable of doing and it doesn't have to be in our actual geographical location.  Oh no!   If it is anywhere near the tower where our beam comes from some 3 hours away from us it will affect our signal.  As you can tell I am thoroughly impressed with my internet service!

There are a couple of work-arounds I use to combat this problem.  The first tool is scheduling posts.  On good internet days I can write a few posts then schedule them to run as desired to give a bit of a cushion when the internet is down.  The second tool is using MS Word for Mac to write off line then cut and paste into the post editor.  Then I readjust any formating necessary and upload any pictures then schedule to post as desired.  Working off line is a practical solution for my particular blogging problem. 

Garden Gnome
©2009-2010