Zoom!

Events meshed well this morning. My telecon ended around 7:45 am and as I was heading for the car, I got a call from the cable installer to say he was on his way. I beat him to the house by a few minutes.

It turned out his job was to install a "trap" that is designed to keep me from getting cable TV while allowing me to get broadband service. As the fellow worked carefully in our waterlogged back yard, I called TimeWarner to see if I could set up their basic service and their one French channel and one Russian channel for what their brochure indicated would cost about $30 per month, with the idea being to avoid another service call (and installation charge).

I was rapidly disabused of the idea when the TW sales rep explained that, between this and that, getting the service I described would cost about $70 per month! Oh, well...

In any event, the broadband installation went well, although the installer wouldn't touch my wireless router, saying something about "liability issues." What he didn't say - and perhaps didn't know - was that upon initially connecting to the network, TW captured my VAIO's MAC address (a unique address that identifies my VAIO's network hardware), which thereupon became a necessary component of any connection to the system. Fortunately, I have DD-WRT running on my wireless router, which includes a capability to "clone" a MAC address, for just such an occasion.

So here I am, connected to the cloud via cable, and let me tell you: the throughput so far is pretty good, exceeding a half megabyte per second over my wireless link to the router!

I now return myself to my regularly scheduled day.

Cheers...

Meeting!

Back in the day (exactly 10 years ago this month), meetings between Russian and US experts were the order of the day. They were organized under the rubric of a "Technical Interchange Meeting" and involved everyone and their pet parakeet. I recall almost 90 interpreters were flown into town for the event, some of whom we had never heard of, and some of whom were subcontracted to some of our contractors ("our" as in: when I worked as a full-time employee for what is now my best client).

Meetings are not as monolithic these days. They occur when the occasion calls for it, and apparently, one such occasion has occurred, and I'll be supporting the tail end of one such meeting tomorrow.

(The assignment had originally begun as an assignment to do another sim, and changed over the course of about 20 minutes into meeting support. For a moment, there, I was concerned that I had received someone else's work order!)

Anyway, the meeting will be a welcome change of pace.

* * *Using wireless with Ubuntu is not so easy if one implements encryption using WPA. I spent about 30 minutes getting grounded in what I need to know, and then I was too lazy to haul out my VAIO's charger, and went back to my office to use wireless under XP. Supposedly, if I give up on the wireless encryption, connecting the Linux side of my laptop isn't that hard. However, given my neighbor's propensity to leave his network exposed, for some reason I feel obligated to keep mine secured.

Hmmm. An interesting artifact of having booted my system into Ubuntu and back into XP is that my system clock now reflects UTC time and not that of the Central time zone.

Fixed.

Galina is using our new capability to browse various real-estate web sites.

Cheers...