King Ink feels like a bug and he hates his rotten shell.

If you are on BT and are finding websites only load for you one try in five or six, it's because their DNS server appears to have had the dick. (Don't expect clue from their tech support.) We have set our DNS to 199.5.157.128, which is aslan.open-rsc.org, an alternate DNS run by crackpots activists. But it works less worse than BT for now.

redcountess has been agitating for some time for her FreeBSD box to be brought back to life, because Windows continues to suck. But dhclient in FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE has occasional problems with just not bloody working. (What this means is that it can't grab an address from your DSL modem or the network, so you have to set all the network configuration by hand.) The workaround appears to be to use an older version. I downloaded the ancient version 2 and it's working like a charm. Crusty and probably not 100% secure, but should be relatively safe behind the NAT.

So as to keep this box upgradable via ports, I have installed only the base system and am doing EVERYTHING else from ports. I expect to be compiling Xorg, KDE and so forth for the next few days. I'm not completely insane — OpenOffice.org is going to be installed from a binary package. Or just run from a Linux binary. Of course, I just tried installing the text browser links and the fucking thing pulled in Xorg. The pr0ts system does partake of considerable crack on occasions.