"If it sounds too good to be true..."

"... it usually is." After an easy first day online, the connectivity went south in a big way. Turns out the open and free network that I found had been up "for testing" since April, and the operator decided to go production -- and charge for access -- on my second day here. And of course, it didn't go smoothly; most of the access points were misconfigured and useless for 36 hours, and even now they take minutes to offer a logon screen for gaining access. The rate is reasonable, I guess ($1.50 per hour) but the bandwidth seems even worse than when it was free (inbound 100 kbps, ourbound 20 kbps, with typical satellite latency of 800 ms round trip). I used skypeOut on the first day for checking voice mail, and for a long if slightly difficult conversation, but today skype is quite useless -- even for picking up voice mail! I guess the DTMF tones get garbled on the poor connectivity now. (Skype also shows its round trip times as 2-10 seconds, rather than the ping times of .8 sec -- don't know why that is.)

And, I think I ate something that didn't agree with me yesterday, so I've spent most of today near the john and taking it easy. Guess that comes with the territory. Went shopping today to stock up on some safe recovery food. Just like the old days!