A prisoner offline

I am currently on an involuntary hiatus from EVE. In fact I am pretty much disconnected from the internet in general. It seems moving into a brand new house is a mistake when it comes to maintaining contiguous connectivity to the internet at large. It appears to come as a shock to the single company responsible for pretty much every phone line in the UK that people moving into a new house will want a phone line. Three weeks after first telling them I want a phone line (*shock*) and they can only tell me they think they might be coming today to fit my line. I won't know for certain until after 1 pm. The tell-tale clue at 1 pm is the engineer not having bothered to come.

Of course I can use mobile internet** to fill in the gap whilst I wait for the 'real' internet to be delivered to my house over two narrow strands of copper. Unfortunately it appears my network decided this particular ex-field I now live in didn't need high speed mobile internet. I tried it and get a 10 second ping time to Google. FML. Kill me now.

My young son and I have been making Minecraft videos for a few weeks and we sat down to create the next couple of episodes. This should be doable because I host the server locally and record voices by plugging both mics into the same PC and using some virtual mixer software to sort the levels out on everything. Sure son, we can do that. Except we couldn't. First I needed to re-log his account into the Minecraft servers. By some miracle I managed to use the GPRS on my phone and get him onto the server. I swapped the phone onto my laptop and tried to log in. It took more attempts but eventually it worked. The his account got kicked from the server. I couldn't log in to the server. My nerves started to fray. I went around in circles getting more and more agitated before admitting defeat. In the meantime he was going to go off and watch stampylonghead videos on YouTube....... (and you think EVE players get upset?!)

So I've resorted to offline games. That's not too bad as I seem to have preloaded a bunch of random games from Steam at some point. I think they are all Humble Bundle games. I have absolutely no idea what any of them are. I picked one at random - English Country Garden - to see what the information said it was about. Much like the EVE server logs, the game info. said nothing. It appears that side of the games library in Steam is a webpage which is unavailable offline. Aargh!!! It turned out to be a fun, abstract, 3D puzzle game which you should totally try.

So it appears I'm addicted. Possibly my whole house has a data addiction and being disconnected is killing us. Conversations which normally end with "let me just Google that" have us stumped instead. How did we manage before the internet was everywhere? Actually, I probably know. I'm watching way more crap TV than I should - my house tends to go to sleep around 10 pm and I get to log in to EVE - crap TV is taking its place. But crap TV is no replacement for EVE. I miss my corp and alliance mates. I miss the drama and giggles on comms. I miss the very few blues we have and losing ships to random ganks or my plain stupidity.

I miss EVE.

**Posted over GPRS, which took bloody ages