Some Days in the Life - June 26, 1999
We're in a studio apartment, do we really need a four port LAN? With room, I'd add, to expand?
There will come a day that Category 5 Cabling will go into every new house built, just like electrical wiring and telephone wiring. Household networks will be commonplace. There'll be a single point of contact out, but everyone will have their own access to that point of contact. We're close to that with cable modems and ISDN right now. Plenty of the ISDN Modems on the market are built in routers, fully capable of routing packets wherever they need to go. Commercial devices will be available in any given Best Buy or Rite Aid, which will let you plug your kids' ethernet patch cables down by the hub through it, and that device will automatically cut their connection off at bedtime. Video streaming will be carried over the same network (better make that a switch instead of a hub) letting people tie into the satellite feed and draw which channels they want, either to a window on their monitor, their fullscreen monitor in video mode, or piped out the video card to an HDTV on the wall.
Heck, we're doing 85% of that right here and now, just Mason and I sitting in my studio apartment. Our router is a piece of software however -- IPNetrouter by Sustainable Softworks. It's running on Egoiste (my home computer, a 8600/300 with an upgrade card to give it a 366/183 Mhz G3 processor and a meg's backslide cache. So, every packet we run's going through my computer, into the serial port and into the 56k Modem.
There's really no delay, which is astounding. Unless both of us try heavy downloads at the same time, everything works just like I were just using my modem, except that it's working that way on Mason's computer too. I guess that says something about the speed of modems, the nature of packet information and the efficiency of routers. Or, it could simply be that we're not nearly as heavy users as we think we are.
Which is likely true of 96% of the people on the Internet today.
It's a grey day today -- chance of rain, or so I'm told. Which is good, because up until today they were predicting sunny and 95 degrees and enough humidity to kill. Now, the air conditioner is here for a reason, so Mason and I would be fine, but when you have two people -- admittedly when one of them's as fun to be around as Mason is -- in a Studio Apartment, you get the desire to leave it every now and again.
This shouldn't imply tension. Mason and I aren't tense around each other. Which is itself pretty amazing. But he's a cool guy. Alan had nice things to say about him yesterday as well, so I think this is going to work out juuuuuuust fine.
Just in time for another person I know to have a scheduled appointment at the Academy this coming week, and a third soon after that. Entirely too cool.
Summer Session kicks in tomorrow. I'll have to be on hand for orientation, so this is the second Sunday in a row I'm a'working. Added to that will be teaching on July 5th, which everyone else has off but Summer Session rolls on. I'm very much looking forward to vacation time, whenever it actually happens. Monday, we pass out powerbooks and I talk Ethics, and learn just when my class will be taking place. I have seven students in it, which is a good number. Four of them are also my advisees -- I'm doing the whole nine yards with the kids this summer, and that's good. I want to know the how and whys of it all. Curriculum building and career building and the rest. Heck, if I do well, I might do this during the year too, and have another fallback should Managing not work out.
Though, frankly Managing seems to be working out. I'm weary at the moment, but that's to be expected every now and again. I look forward to the return of Eileen.
Tuesday, we actually start teaching the class. This is where the fun starts.
My major question is, will the kids love or hate the class? I'm hoping it's the former. We'll see.
I've started on the editing of the outline for the Ethereal Player's Guide. We're staying close to the apartment this weekend, so I expect that I'll get that finished and sent off to the Archangel today, and then (gasp) actually get some Fairhaven done again. Elethia's been patient with me, but she's really ready to move on now. And so, for that matter, am I. I was in something of a funk last evening, which I came out of, but I think it's spiritual constipation from not getting more work done on the book. It should be a fast write, if the timing would let me write it.
Alternately, I could have needed a longer nap.
All of which means it's time to get to it. So, later all.
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