Lots has happened. Living in California now. (Still recommending Penske truck rental despite engine trouble: a fully loaded 26-ft truck towing a car trailer is not, in fact, supposed to be slowed down by ordinary freeway grades.) I was surprised to find good IP connectivity at every little podunk motel. David Sedaris on CDs made western Nebraska a much funnier place than it probably is, though the forty "No Parking" signs at each rest stop would have seemed odd anyhow. Iowa gets no points for touting WiFi access at their rest stops, teasing with DHCP, but not actually moving any packets.

Corinex makes a very handy, very small $100 gadget they call an "AV Phoneline-Ethernet Bridge". It puts up-to-125 MBits/s on up-to-2k feet of a phone wire-pair -- much cheaper than DSL back-to-back. (I'm getting 57 Mbits on 500 ft of very bad line.) It's much better at carrying traffic in one direction than both at once, so you'd be better off using four of 'em and two phone lines if you were trunking. (Flash new firmware before you plug them in, mine were at V0.0.1).

Before buying from Corinex I placed three Linksys WRT54G 802.11b/g routers, reflashed with sveasoft's replacement firmware, at 200 ft intervals. Total failure: uptime maybe 15%, and whenever they lost contact with one another, the head-end unit hammered the upstream router with thousands of ARPs per second, overwhelming it. A weedeater in earshot sufficed to take it out completely. Who said WiFi was going to take over the world?

Signed with Teliax for VoIP service, in addition to VOIPjet and NuFone, because mtr says its route has a lot less delay and jitter -- from here -- than NuFone's. ("host -l" is your friend when you're evaluating VoIP services!) VOIPjet only does IP->analog, NuFone only analog->IP, Teliax both. Teliax's marketing material doesn't reveal that the prepaid plan can be attached to an 800 number for $5/mo plus minutes used, or that they also provide voicemail and rollover. NuFone and VOIPjet cost only when you use them, and VOIPjet has the best rates: 1.3c/min (plus a tax for pre-paying less than $500 at a time!).

lkcl is right about asterisk, except (1) there's asteriskdocs.org now -- just the glossary helps enormously; (2) asterisk is supposed to be able to jimmy its SIP packets to sneak them through NAT, although Luke can hardly be blamed for not finding it! and (3) the IAX2 protocol doesn't have SIP's problems; I wonder why Luke doesn't use it.

Galeon hasn't crashed lately. This might have something to do with Gnome 2.8/2.10 or Mozilla being more stable.