I'm on fire.

[reddragdiva]

Work laptop talks to the office fine — intraweb, email, shared drives, SSH. I'm all set for an exciting weekend of ... sitting on the couch at home in case shit breaks. No, no 3G to connect from the pub. I HOPE YOU HAVE A REALLY WONDERFUL WEEKEND OUT. Bah.

They've adopted the sort of security one would need when giving people a W*nd*ws laptop: it's so insanely locked down it won't even talk to things on the local network beyond grabbing DHCP and sending and receiving pings. When you're in the VPN, it doesn't do the pings either. Trusted client, but breaking it would be Wrong. And resemble effort.

Windows XP is so insanely, ridiculously fat and slow. Kubuntu is much nicer.

I'm glad my laptop battery wasn't recalled.

Comments

[neefsck.livejournal.com]

So...you're moving *backwards* technology wise yeah? :)

[reddragdiva]

Apparently they use that because they've always used that. Rather than e.g. the cheaper option of installing a second phone line with DSL.

I also have a dial-up modem in case both are out. PH3AR.

[neefsck.livejournal.com]

..dial..up..modem...?

Whats that? :)

[reddragdiva]

ENTIRELY COMPOSED OF TENTACLES. AAAALLL THE WAAAY DOOOWN.

I certainly hope you and Mel can still explain how V.34 and V.90 actually work to push 10× the bitrate worth of information down a phone line. Let alone DSL.

[neefsck.livejournal.com]

Id love to explain that,but unfortunately something happened to that part of my brain.

:)

[reddragdiva]

/me makes modem connection noise at you

*skreeeetshhhhhhhh-boingyboingy-screeeetchSCREEEEEEEEETCH*

[vatine]

Oooh, "modern", high-speed modem! (the boingboingboing is a giveaway)

[vatine]

To be fair, the ISDN only relies on BT's switch fabric to be up and a RAS to be up.
The DSL option requires BT's IP network to be up, the magic RADIUS boxes to be up and the DSL on the central end to be up. And, unless one pays for dedicated DSL termination kit, VPN concentrator(s) to be up.

I'd probably go with eth ISDN or plain dial-up, to minimise pain.

[reddragdiva]

I'd go with the phone never ringing ever and me being down the pub for a week.

[reddragdiva]

And that's a particularly strange usage of the term "minimise pain."

[vatine]

It's used in the same sense as "I prefer to use a thin, sharp needle rather than a 2x4 when piercing my chest, to minimise pain".

Ideally, we'd all be basket-weavers on a suitably-temperate mountain, rather than having to deal with bits and bytes. Unfortunately, I don't think "join a commune and never bother with a time unit shorter than a season" is an option right now.

We used to say of the communards....

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

..."you can't talk to them until they run out of money."

I think some of the crafters actually made a living at it if one of them had a day job.