Electric Josh

Monday, July 22, 2002

Apparently the link below about the explosion around the corner from work is gone from the Globe's site. If websites aren't at least semipermanent records, then what's the point? Why would I ever link to something in the Boston Globe again if their links are going to change? Sounds to me like a sure way for a site operator to prevent links, hence to prevent traffic to the site. Hmmmm. #

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Finally got the house set up with 802.11b, which allows me to do all of my network-related screwing around in any room of the house. (For 802.11b purposes, the back patio and the hammock in the back yard both count as rooms.) One of these days, when I'm involved in something at work that doesn't require much interaction with my coworkers, I'm going to spend the day working from home, just to see if it can be done. I'm sure that any falloff in productivity will be more than compensated for by the fact that getting lunch will be really fast, and by the 90 minutes I don't have to spend commuting. (And by the 30 minutes I probably wouldn't spend grooming. Heh, heh.) The wireless network is fast. In fact, since the thinnest pipe is the one from the cable modem to the outside internet, the network speed when connected wirelessly is indistinguishable from the speed I get from a direct wire to the cable modem. Cool.

As usual, the hardest part about getting all the new hardware configured was getting K's Win98 laptop to recognize a new PCMCIA card. My Debian box, once I knew what to edit, took less than 60 seconds to get connected. The router/base station itself, a slightly cheaper, off-brand model, was pretty trivial to get running---as it should have been, although just because this stuff should be easy doesn't usually mean that the manufacturer bothered to make it so.

The network speed doesn't change noticeably at all when both of us are connected at the same time (each with our laptop), probably since it's a rare instant that we're both trying to download anything simultaneously. One wonders how many neighbors could connect to this network before we used up the bandwidth from a single cable modem...? #

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Got my annual sunburn at Nantasket beach in Hull, the town with one of the worst names in America (although few burgs can compare to nearby Braintree). I managed to spend the day kayaking, swimming, body surfing, throwing a frisbee, kayaking again, swimming again, and playing badminton. I used no sunscreen. Dumb. #