Woooohoooooo - the 21st century has just begun!

Maybe this message looks like a little late for you, but for me it's true. Today I finally got an xDSL internet connection, which starts a whole new epoch for me.

So far, I only had an ISDN connection with a maximum transfer rate of 7 - 8 KB/s. Every 8 hours, the line has been disconnected automatically, so no big downloads were possible - and even smaller downloads made it impossible to surf through the web comfortably. That was extremely limiting and there were many things that I could only dream of.

Now, these times are over! Today I have already downloaded more data than I usually did (or could) in a whole month before - I'm just installing SuSE Linux 10.1 Beta9 in a VMWare server (both just downloaded), and Ubuntu 5.10 is almost finished. Many more things are planned - also to take a close look at MaxDB, as it won't be a problem anymore to quickly download all the things that I need. Downloading new versions of MySQL when they come out? Will now be a laugh!

Besides, I'm listening to Internet Radio (through ITunes) without any interruptions (although the Ubuntu download is still running). Also the MySQL webinars are one of the new great possibilities. And ... and ... and ..... a list that doesn't stop.

And my iPod Nanos that I won at the MySQL 5 Contest get a whole new meaning as well ... it's now fun to surf around with ITunes. With ISDN, it was rather frustrating.

I also mentioned in my last article that I bought a new PC and I also got myself a new Java enabled mobile phone. That's another exciting thing, to take a look at J2ME, how to write Java applications for mobile appliances. I'm sure, MySQL will also be of great value in this context.

So it feels like when I was a little boy on my first Christmasses. But more than that, it's a big step from the past forward to reasonable up-to-date standards.