Update: Daily Equestria Life With Monster Girl

I'm not going to try and recap the chaos which made the first posting of the month take place on the 21st.  (I'll try to reach five, as the last two scheduled appointments for September both take place tomorrow.  I just don't have much confidence in reaching the goal.)  I think the majority of you have seen the blog entries and for those who haven't, you know where to look.  Instead, I want to use this space to mention two things.

1.  Some of this 8100-word chapter was worked on while waiting for my mother to clear her appointment at the dental school.

2.  It's been months since the last visit to that building:  the pandemic had it closed for a while.  Long enough to let me forget.

A dental school is still a college.  Tuition for the full period of attendance can approach or potentially exceed six digits.  An expensive school, hosting expensive equipment, training students for a profession which charges patients a great expense.

You'd think all of that would mean the building could install a Wi-Fi system which didn't lose connection with your device every time you moved three inches, and if you did, you would be horribly wrong.

It's not the device itself.  This happened when I had the Kindle, it happens with the current tablet, and I've watched patients and waiting transport have it happen with phones, laptops, and the occasional smartwatch.  There's a free network available for visitors.  In fact, it's the same one the students use:  it's just accessed through the second option on the login menu.  And it is completely incapable of tracking the receiving end for any signal.  If I'm sitting perfectly still -- perfectly -- too much breathing can disqualify -- I get something fast enough to stream.  One particularly-long appointment some time ago saw me get through several episodes of an animated series.  

But at the instant position is changed, any device will be lost by the network.  You're still logged in:  you just don't receive anything.  All pages come up as Unable To Locate.  If you have access to a data plan, it can't be tapped because as far as your device is concerned, you're online.  But you won't see so much as a single 0 or 1 come through the feed.  And the only way to resolve it is by telling the program to forget the network, followed by finding it all over again and starting from scratch.  Which works perfectly -- until the next time you move.

As a visitor, it's painful.  But for the students, who must be able to look things up on the fly, or at least while on the walk...  they are paying tens of thousands per year and getting access to a network which is outmatched by the free service available at your average McDonald's.  It's been like that since I first learned they had a network at all, and that's been enough time for the first student dentist we used to graduate.  The school won't upgrade.  They certainly seem to have no interest in fixing anything.  And when student and supervisor tried to send out a scrip at the end of the appointment, it took them ten minutes to find enough of a connection for that split-second of contact with the pharmacy -- along with wrestling through a scrip-writing program which seemed to be actively fighting them all the way.

I know some of my sponsors live outside the United States, and that a few have heard legends about how horrible our Internet connections are.  Overpriced, unreliable, and slow. 

Whatever you've heard?

It's worse.