Back!

At long last today, I got broadband access back. The guy showed up this morning and did the basic connection. Unfortunately, it was not initially reliable. The name server kept dropping out. It turned out the problem was that the signal strength was too good. I take this to be a good problem. The guy came back. A 'thingy' was added to the line and now it works just fine.

Being without broadband has been an interesting experience. One gets used to such luxuries all too easily. Being back in the dial-up world taught me a great deal about web site design. Too much fancy stuff and they become simply unusable. This is worth keeping in mind.

One of the great advantages of the new setup is that I can now use my Linux partition at home. Prior to this, for all sorts of technical reasons, this was not an option. As this is my main partition for 'real work', this will make me much more productive, as I no longer have to go into the office. Even my technical software, which is expensive and requires licenses, seems to work just fine. This is a joy. I can relegate my windows partition to just playing DVDs.

This being said, it took me a while to get get the entire wireless network back up, running and secure. This is time well spent. Not being on a tightly secured connection can make all sorts of bad things happen.

I tested the new set up this afternoon, but calling a Brazilian friend of mine on Skype. The connection was amazing! If you do not know this software and have research collaborators around the world, I strongly recommend it.

So, I should be able to get back to posting to this damn blog on a regular basis. It will not happen immediately though. I have funeral things to deal with over the weekend (see the previous post on this matter). However, The Combat Philosopher is back! You have been warned. Thanks for putting up with the outage and visiting nonetheless.

The CP