Dial-Up Web is Dead

I recently hit the monthly usage limit on my "unlimited" plan on Bigpond cable plan (no thanks to two seasons of Alan Partridge I had to have). Now I must ride out the rest of the month in cattle class, permitted a mere 64kbps trickle of bits. Horribly frustrating. Especially, as I found out, now that web developers no longer consider the poor, wretched dial-up user

Loading up Gmail often takes so long (presumably pulling down all those 1000's of lines of fat, Ajaxy client functionality) I am displayed a message that something may be amiss and perhaps I'd be more comfortable reading through my correspondence in the discreet surrounds of a JavaScript-less, bare-bones version. To which I say NAY! Maybe it is YOU, Larry and Sergey, who would be more comfortable. I am fine waiting right here. And Richard Gere is paying me $50,000 a night so trust me, you want my business. Or something.

It is easy to forget I am now far from the frothy rapids of broadband, as I laze in my inner-tube on a fetid slow-moving pond of algae, I will still sometimes absent-mindedly click on a YouTube link only to realize this is yet another club I am no longer welcome at.

Google maps is but a pipe dream. Gone is that illusion of interactivity Web 2.0 clings to like a shower curtain to your clammy wet leg. I curse those cute, airbrushed, drop-shadowed, light refracting logos. Their bloated alpha channels taunting me as I wait for them to load, thinking back to a time long-passed where you could get a logo, some rounded corners and a background image or two and still have change from a kilobyte. And so I'm calling it. Dial-up web: time of death January, 2007.