I just got my cable modem installed, and it’s great to be back. For the past few days, I’ve been mooching off of my neighbor’s wireless connection with my laptop. Now I’m back to my much-newer desktop computer, and it’s sooooo nice.

Comcast requires new customers to run some custom software in order to activate the connection. I tried to avoid it, but they seem to have things locked down pretty well. I sacrificed my laptop to the task and installed the bloated software. When that was done, I tried plugging my desktop computer into the cable modem in place of the laptop (my router hasn’t arrived yet). No dice. It seems that Comcast locked the connection to my laptop’s MAC address. Bah.

After a quick dive into the recesses of Windows on my desktop, I had my desktop’s NIC spoofing my laptop’s MAC address. Translation: internet internet internet!

Good times. It’s hard for me to imagine a world without the internet. I’ve been using it since 1994, and BBSes since 1993, so from my perspective it’s always been there. Granted, those first few years were experienced at a blistering 2400bps pace, but slow connectivity was better than no connectivity. I can remember spending an hour to download a 500kbyte file from a BBS. Nowadays, downloading a multi-gigabyte file at 500kbyte/s is no big deal.

I can’t wait for fiber-to-the-home.