How to spend 20 gigs of bandwidth

Looks like I'm going to have a lazy time this festive season compared to last year, when I went on a road trip to East London with a friend.

I'm going to go to a guesthouse in some kind of wilderness in December, chill for around a week or so, then go to Durban and stay at a friend's flat. My friend agreed to lend me her flat for a week at the beginning of January. A week by the sea in summer. Nice, no? Sorry Po, I'll think about you while I'm enjoying your hometown.

I also tried to start getting some of the Christmas presents. I had more than 20gigs of bandwidth which I bought through a special promotion, so I decided to give away some of it to friends and family to add to whatever Christmas gifts I wasplanning to give them. Bandwidth is something useful afterall, and I was planning to give my nephews and nieces a gig each to download whatever they want from the Internet. They're teens or in their early twenties: they can never have too many downloads!

Unfortunately, Vodacom, my service provider, did not make it easy. See, I've given away airtime to people before. You just go to your dashboard and reallocate a bundle of your airtime to another cellphone number, as long as they use Vodacom's service. So I assumed the same principle applied to bandwidth reallocation, especially as Vodacom does offer a data bundle facility on the dashboard. Turns out that you can't donate data from your own allocation; you can only buy for another number. Gah! Why would I want to buy bandwidth when I already have more than enough? And my gift budget is for actual gifts, not bandwidth. This was just going to be an extra.

So, this December I'm going to have a very interesting Internet experience. I don't know what I'm going to do with 20 gigs because I usually use between 2-4 gigs of data per month. And that's including the times when I do research for my writing projects and deal with heavy multimedia.

The only two times I even worked up to 5 gigs was when I when I was developing web sites for two TV shows ( OneLove and Kwanda). And that's because the production company was sending promotion videos for all 13 episodes of each show, as well as the promotional material for the shows and the actors.

Huh! It will be interesting to watch YouTube videos and TV shows online and even listen to radio stations without worrying about data consumption. I'm also going to dowload as many books I've been wanting to read ( which are available for free or as part of the creative commons).