You can always do a list · 27 November 2003
- Here’s Refer 2.1
- Q. How do you spot an extroverted Norwegian?
A. He’s staring at your shoes. - As of right now, I owe email to 7,512 people.
- We got pipes.
As of 6:40pm last Thursday, after two years trying a hundred combinations of hardware and software, learning far more than I’d ever hoped about satellite VPNs and bridging Windows network devices, throwing good money after bad, we have a broadband internet connection out here in the sticks. It’s about a third the speed of DSL, and it caps out at six downloadable gigabytes per month, but it works.
For a number of reasons I didn’t buy a Dell after all, the foremost of which is, after writing on this site that I was getting a Dell, a number of helpful and detailed emails came in saying, essentially, you’ll regret it. Then there was another email touting Dell’s pricing strategy as evidence of the genius of the free market in the face of unions and Stalinism. Meh.
These likeable nebbishim down the road in Ganges were able to come close to Dell’s best offer for a basic setup. I’m far happier driving the box over there to see something fixed than being routed through a support call centre in Bangalore (nothing against the people of India, or the people of Norway for that matter). The guy who owns the place in Ganges actually lives here in Pompignan, not that I would ever consider abusing that proximity by phoning at dinner time to get a bum keyboard replaced like I did the other night.
So I am now, for the first time ever, a paid-up licensee of the leading-edge web-ready enterprise computing platform Microsoft Windows.
I always knew Windows was homely, in a worn-down industrial carpeting kind of way, but had no clue just how fucking ugly XP is. It’s like living inside a perpetual Powerpoint presentation, with sham friendliness pelting down everywhere. Someone really ought to repeatedly sky-write the word RESTRAINT over Redmond.
And for all the talk of XP’s networking smarts, there was nothing plug-and-play about bridging the satellite VPN to a local network. I could get the web to work, but HTTPS would fail; FTP worked, then mail would fail.
In the end I installed a proxy server, plugged in the Airport, and the whole house was wirelessly online in five minutes. As this could have been done with, say, a 486 running Windows 95, I may now be owner of the world’s most expensive PCI slot, one whose cooling fans sound forever like a 747 taxiing for takeoff.
But we got pipes.
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