Sunday, December 29, 2002
When my girlfriend leaves town, it seems that the more anxious I am to see her, the sicker and more bedraggled she is when she's arrives at the airport.
1:20:10 PM
Added to the blogroll: Armed Liberal. Been reading it off and on and it's refreshing to see detailed and well thought-out political commentary coming from the Left. I need something to balance out all the rightie news blogs I've been reading.
Modern Middle Manager. Some good technology viewpoints from the IT front. Some of the Windows/Unix commentary makes me think of all the woes that my dad is having.
My dad runs a one man shop but he has some real IT needs. First of all, he needs to understand firewalls and VPNs and the like because home networks are getting more sophisticated and the control systems he is integrating need to talk to that stuff. Second of all, he works offsite all the time but he often needs stuff from his office. So he needs a firewall and VPN support, or some workable equivalent. Personally I think he could cobble something together with Groove but he'll need to be courant with the way secure networks are set up anyways.
So I had an old computer laying around that I did not use anymore, an ancient P133 that I gave to him. After about a week, he finally got Debian installed on it, and after two days of cursing and frustration while I was out of town, he was a few hours away from getting the Ethernet cards to work. (Yup, you need to recompile the fucking kernel if you want to change around the hardware!) I feel sorry for my mom.
I had suggested at the get-go that he did not want to brain-damage of getting a Unix system to work, but most lessons are learned the hard way. At this point, I figured I needed to help him, so I started re-perusing the network HOWTOs, the Network Administrator's guide and started to look into getting some VPN support installed. Not for the faint of heart.
So I suggested that my dad get a Qube. I think after a few more days of Linux headaches, my mom will be begging him to spend the money and buy one.
1:18:39 PM
Last Update: 1/1/2003; 10:11:20 PM
