You can go to America!

The rest of our stuff will be arriving next Tuesday! Since the end of July we have fundamentally lived without it, and I am looking forward to seeing all of my clothes, art supplies, most favorite books, and the printer for our computers...Well, you couldn't exaggerate how excited I am.

Without all of that stuff, my laptop is the center of my entertainment every day. I spend quite a lot of time on the apartment hunt, of course, and I've been doing some writing. I've noticed some real differences now that I am accessing the web through a Belgian internet service and server! For instance, I like having Google as my homepage. The clear white screen with its graceful, balanced searchbox is serene. It appeals to my sense of simplicity and design. The first time I opened Internet Explorer here, it automatically reset my homepage to Google.be! If you search Google.be, all of your top ranked results are in Dutch, in which I have about a three-year-old comprehension. I wrestled with it for a while, and we compromised on me getting to have Google.com as my homepage, with a prominent suggestion to switch to the Belgian Google linked on the page.

I've also noticed a change in the advertisements that I get in the sidebar on my Yahoo mail. Every day now as I log in, I am greeted with variations on, "Click here to get your American Green Card!" "Live and work in the United States!" "The only official site for a lifetime American Green Card!!". If that goes where I think it goes, I've been to the Immigration and Naturalization web page, and it's not nearly as much fun as they make it sound.

I've also discovered that the websites in America know where I am. I mean, of course they do, they can just ping my server or whatever. But this revealed that all computer users are not equal. The file for one of my games got corrupted, and I do not have the disk with me. I tried repairing the game every way that I could, but in the end, the only solution is to re-install. I figured, well, I can just download the game, re-install it, and I will be good to go, no problem. For those of you who are wondering, it's World of Warcraft. Travis and I talked about it, and we decided that we would pay the $20 to set up a new account and download it, and then when my sister, Nay, gets her new apartment and internet service set up, we could transfer her character off of our current account to that one, and we could all play together. I entered in the number of our debit card from our American bank account, clicked download--and horrors! I discovered that I am not eligible to download the game because I am in Europe!

After much searching, I found a way to download a free trial of the game, but it is trickling into my computer at a blazing 3 to 15 kb a second. It is a 2.8 Gig file, and for those of you who have no picture of how slow that really is, you can figure that it will be done downloading just about when the disk gets here with the rest of our stuff. ;)