rain

An awful, grey day. AA Flight 587 would be a tragedy in any case, but is doubly so because it happened so shortly after 9/11, and crashed in a neighborhood that's already lost so many firefighters and police officers. Many condolences to all of the families who lost someone today, and all of the folks in Queens/Rockaway and at American Airlines.

decorating

... is almost done. Carpet is evil stuff to cut, and bathroom caulk is horrifying stuff to work with, since I'd never used a caulking gun before, and ended up getting covered in it. On the upside, the place is starting to really come together, and feel like home. I can't wait to have a big housewarming party.

dshell

For some reason, the SBC/PacBell DSL modem arrived, and I didn't touch it for two weeks. I finally took it out of the box, and spent a couple of hours making it work, which roughly divided into an hour of setup, using my trusty PowerMac 9500 with 2 ether cards for fw/dhcp/nat/ip masq via the very cool IPNetRouter program made by Sustainable Softworks. The second hour was spent sifting through my drive, and extracting all of the crap that the impolite SBC/PacBell DSL install software had placed on my system. Can anyone enlighten me as to why DSL providers must use the horrid PPPoE protocol, instead of simply provisioning the modem for n number of MAC addresses and using a DHCP server cluster? In the end, it all worked though, and a benchmark revealed that I was getting 1.2 - 1.3 Mbps down, and 500- 600 kbps up, which was nice.

I want this day to be over.

--- Rupert