We just got back from a week at the town of Milho Verde (population ~2000 or so), near the source of the Jequitinhonha River in the interior of Minas Gerais. This is about 350Km from where I live.

Photos will be posted next week. It was a very nice vacation, although I wouldn’t do this sort of thing often… you’ll see why. 😀

Anyway, the newly-opened tourist base had an old Pentium 133 with modem and I managed to log on a couple of times, after about an hour trying. The nearest Internet provider is about 150Km away and the @#$%^ modem insisted on connecting at 46 Kbps; using V.90 instead of dropping back to the older, more reliable V.34bis.

This being a Windows machine I didn’t manage to figure out where to change the modem script (or its equivalent). So it would connect, work for anywhere from zero to 5 minutes, and then stop working – without, however, dropping the connection. And, of course, there’s no configuration parameter for working at reduced speed…

Needless to say, the connection never stayed up long enough for me to post anything or reply to e-mail. Anyway, things are back to normal now.