Broadband's bounties

I STILL remember how enthralled I was the first time I did e-mail. I was totally awed to learn the modem was connecting at what then seemed to be a supersonic speed of 2,400 bits per second.

Today, a phone connection can go as high as 56,000 bits per second, but that's still a snail's pace compared with broadband or high-speed Internet, where you can get speeds of between 384,000 and 3,000,000 bits per second.

For about two years now, I've had tantalizing tastes of these high-speed connections in hotels and airports overseas and at the University of the Philippines (yes, our university has broadband!). But I've resisted the temptation to get on this high-speed bandwagon at home, partly because of the cost (the cheapest monthly subscription is P1,500) and also because of principles. Zen practitioners would murmur, "Mu…," which is the Japanese word for "none," signifying a detachment from self, from the world, from the fixation over speed.

Got mail?

Alas for my mu principles, I finally succumbed about two months ago because (and I'm not rationalizing) my work involves a lot of e-mail -- at least 50 a day, many with large attachments. To give one example, last week a science journal sent me a 38-page article for review, while the other day I received several research questionnaires to comment on.

Some readers know what it's like receiving these huge files on a regular phone connection. You spend half an hour downloading an extra large attachment and just as you are about to get the complete document, the phone connection goes kaput. "Shoot me!" you protest because you have to start all over again. And as long as you don't download the document, you run the danger of clogging up your box, with the consequence that other e-mail can't come in and people writing you may get a message saying, "Mailbox full." Broadband helps you unclog your electronic mailbox faster and without tying up your phone line because it uses a separate cable.

Mind you, in this age of high-speed Internet, people do tend to be indiscriminate with what they send. You'll find yourself getting more and more unsolicited photographs of friends in various stages of inebriation. So, remember the Golden Broadband Rule: Don't e-mail others what you don't want them to e-mail you.

Minor aggravations aside, broadband does offer many bounties. I'm going to describe some of them, but keep in mind that my biases are those of a nerd -- I don't have links for downloading rap music, or movies, or games.

Streaming in the world

The best part of high-speed Internet is getting to tune into the world, that is, listening to radio stations, which you can't do with dial-up connections.

The broadband of Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. still has bugs, sometimes conking out for a few hours, but when it's working, it allows you to stream in the world's radio stations. Just tuning into British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) makes broadband worthwhile. Visit bbc.co.uk/radio to get an initial menu of stations. Click on BBC World Service for excellent coverage of international issues. The other stations are more oriented toward listeners in Britain but have good international content. Radio 3's content, for example, is described as "classical, jazz, world arts, drama" while Radio 4 features "intelligent speech," meaning talk shows and documentary features, all generally lively and with substantial content. For example, they have a weekly program, called "The Moral Maze," where theologians, ethicists and health professionals tackle pressing ethical issues around life and death.

BBC does the world a great service by archiving many of its programs, meaning you don't have to catch it as it is being broadcast. You can click any time to get the most recent broadcasts of a particular show and listen at your own pace, pausing or jumping ahead, or even taping the program.

For the view from across the Atlantic, use your broadband to get National Public Radio (www.npr.org) which offers news about the United States and the world that you won't get on CNN or sub-intelligent Fox. NPR's liberal views got them into trouble recently, as conservative members of the US Congress attempted to slash its budget. Fortunately, NPR is also supported by communities, and listeners were able to protest and block the conservatives.

Downloading Jose Rizal

Broadband isn't just for listening to radio stations. I often think of the Internet as a virtual neighborhood of bookstores and libraries. Broadband allows you to run around the neighborhood, browsing through thousands of shelves and, best of all, actually taking out some of the books.

Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.com) is the most amazing of these online libraries. Working on donations and volunteer time, they've transformed 16,000 books, whose copyrights have expired, into electronic files that you can download for free.

To mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of Miguel de Cervantes' "Don Quixote," I downloaded electronic files of the original Spanish version, an English translation and a special 19th-century edition featuring illustrations by Gustave Dore. All done in about half an hour on broadband.

Then I found and downloaded two anthropology books: one on the Igorot tribe of the northern town of Bontoc and the other on the Tingguian of Abra province, both written in the early part of the 20th century.

Gutenberg also has several Tagalog books. I picked out a copy of "Doctrina Cristiana," which was the first book printed in the Philippines, and Balagtas' "Florante at Laura" epic.

On their online catalogue, a search on "Rizal" produced a fairly good list, including the full text of Charles Derbyshire's English translations of Rizal's two novels and the original Spanish version of "The Philippines: A Century Hence."
I nearly fell off my virtual surfboard when I found out Gutenberg had parts of Blair and Robertson's "The Philippine Islands," a monumental compilation of Spanish accounts about the Philippines from 1493 to 1898. The original books cost thousands of pesos, if you can find them. And a few years back, the Bank of the Philippine Islands put the books on CD and sold them for P1,500 each (I'm not sure if you can still get them).

Nope, I haven't downloaded the Gutenberg versions of Blair and Robertson because there are only 21 of the 55 volumes available. (Thank you, thank you to whoever's been transforming these classics into electronic books.)

Again, a friendly Zen reminder for broadband: "Mu, don't take more than what you can handle. And be selective."
Which is why, so far, I've resisted the temptation to download the electronic versions of the "Gloriagate" tapes and transcripts from the Inquirer site (www.inq7.net) and from the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (pcij.org/blog/?p=108).

You'll need broadband to download those huge files, but for mortals still using dial-up connections, don't feel too bad: the website of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism has small files you can download in the form of 32 --yes sir, yes ma'am, 32 -- ringtone variations of "Hello, Garci" and other presidential lapses.