(no subject)

I just want to say that it's mighty gratifying to finally have fast wireless net in the living room. There's probably some semi-profound observation I could divine from this, but not right now. I've got fast net while sitting on a comfy couch. This utterly fails to suck.

Just sayin'.

A "Connections" moment

For those of you who never saw the series "Connections" on your local public television station, it was a wonderful series of shows that talked about the various baby-steps and breakthroughs that happened through time to get from point A to point B (e.g. from the first coinage to modern rocketry). There was a bit of political posturing, and a little bit of data-torturing, but all in all it was a fascinating series of shows, and would recommend them to anyone. Elias-Bob says check in your local public library for the videotapes. I know for a fact that the Boston public library has them.

Anyway, the point of this exercise is that every now and then, one is momentarily forced to look at The Bigger Picture, and see how what you take for granted today was built up over a very long period of time, advance upon advance, to get you to something remarkably commonplace now, but unheard of even a few years ago.

In this particular instance, I'm talking about making a pot of tea (Lapsang Souchong, to be precise), having breakfast, and sitting down to read the paper in the morning. The tea and breakfast are nothing new. However....

....reading the paper on the web, while on my laptop, with integrated wireless networking, going to a tiny wireless base station sitting 35 feet above me, which then goes to my cable modem, out through the cable TV lines, out to the Internet and back in about 40 milliseconds....

....is simply astounding, if you actually stop to think about it.

a brief commentary on cable modem provider policies

First they came for the VPNs, but I said nothing, because I used ssh.

Then they came for the upstream bandwidth, but I said nothing, because I didn't serve warez on KaZaa.

Then they came for my web usage, but I said nothing, because I used an encrypted tunnel to a proxy.

Then they came for the illegal MAC addresses, but I said nothing, because I could spoof a legal one.

Then they came for my unsupported, digital-rights-management-free system, and there was no one left to say anything.