William, here's a thought to save you time.
I dont know if you have an ftp-only account with your host. If not, and you can ssh to your serverspace, you may be able to completely eliminate getting the files to the local computer. Use something like wget or lynx from your host server to get the tarball there directly from geeklog.net at a much faster rate and do the switcheroo. (On one of my sites, this is how the first install as well as upgrades were done.)
All you need is a terminal running ssh connected to the host and the availability of lynx or wget (if its a linux based server, these are probably already there) and the fact that you are on dialup would become mostly irrelevant.
Ajay