Dialup, it's been so long

I'm not at home, not at work. But my laptop can still go online, thanks to Airtel/GPRS. Alas, GPRS gives you dialup speeds at best, and often much worse (it depends on how heavily the mobile network is being used at that location at that time).

So after a long time I'm realising how much the modern internet sucks at such connection speeds. Some sites work well, some crawl. Guess which ones have eschewed HTML (which ought to have been the language of the web) for flash, java and other rubbish. Macromedia (now Adobe) and Sun have much to answer for.

Google and its allied sites (including, yes, blogspot) are among the worse (but not worst) offenders. That's the same Google that beat the earlier generation of search engines by offering a lean, mean, fast website. They aren't flash-heavy; I suspect all that new-fangled ajax stuff is to blame.

Some people have talked about the withdrawal symptoms such a situation gives you. Luckily, I have other (nicer) things on my mind...