OK, maybe not. But the satellite internet service is now in and it seems to work fine.

The installer was caught up at another site and the 1:30pm appointment quickly became 5pm, so I filled in the time doing more flooring. Now I've nearly finished one end of the house with perhaps an hour of work left to finish and do the final edging. So it wasn't all wasted.

*Warning Geek Speak follows*

According to the paperwork that came with the satellite modem there is a quarter of a second round-trip delay introduced, which doesn't seem too bad. I already need to cope with a 300ms delay to servers in Sweden. I've logged on to the corporate VPN and it was stable and worked. IRC lag was showing at between 1.3 and 2 seconds most of the time, which is acceptable. Web browsing is pretty fast, certainly as quick as my current ADSL connection. What I was dreading was using ssh, and I needed to check on the system status of four servers before I could go home, so I gritted my teeth and fired up cssh to the servers, waited probably 5 seconds or so for the sessions to stabilise (which may have been the corporate network, I've seen similar times before), and then typed in top and saw it come up in all four windows in under a second, so that is far better than I thought it would be. Email started off quickly, but started to get "sticky", which could have been anything. I had read that you need to optimise network settings to get the best performance out of the link, and had not done anything to that end - this was taking the laptop and plugging it in with no prior setup.

I'm not sure how Karen is doing multiple single-day trips a week. The drive isn't too bad, but 6 hours of driving per day certainly takes it out of you. Music up loud and lots of coffee does seem to help though.