Unfulfilled Promises

[kingandy]

January has come and January has gone, and Maelstrom has failed to materialise. Allegedly the mailshot has/willsoonbe gone out, but that's just not good enough. We were promised January. I demand my money back!

It's something I've found myself saying a lot lately, but is no less true for it: if you give somebody something for free they get annoyed when you take it away. And even if you know it belongs to you - you were being generous letting them use it for a time - you feel bad about depriving them. Especially when they look up at you with their big, brown doe eyes and say "Oh please Andy, I won't be much longer, I just have to finish chatting to everyone then you can have your computer back..."

Really, it's like kicking a puppy. Which is why I found myself watching the X-Men movie last night. Sigh.

Comments

[blue-room.livejournal.com]

Mark W: As regards getting something for free and then taking it away, I often amuse myself by imagining most of our users having to go cold turkey if ever we decided to turn Pagga off. But I'm not at heart a cruel man so this probably won't happen (unless we turn it off for laugh to see what happens and how many e-mails we get :)).
She needs a laptop and then you can just fight over the phoneline, until you get broadband. It's the only way our household will survive I'm thinking.

Re:

[kingandy]

I have broadband. She has a computer of her own. We tried to set up an always-on gateway, but when stsquad tried to set up the box it sulked because it couldn't tell the difference between the two identical network cards.

Hmm, maybe I'll buy that new computer I've been thinking about and set my old one up as a Windows server. It may require the occasional reboot but at least it'll be running...

Re:

[stsquad.livejournal.com]

Ahh yes, I'd forgotten about that. However much as setting up gateways is fun and entertaining I've since moved onto using things like this which works, has wireless and most importantly still allows me to setup port forwarding.

Re:

[kingandy]

Foul tempter! I don't have that much money lying around the place. Which reminds me, I must pay off my credit card from buying that DVD player...

So, is that basically a pre-configured combined gateway and hub, or what?

Re: WRT54G

[stsquad.livejournal.com]

Pretty much - I have yet to play wth the new one (I got for Crimbo) but my old one (a earlier model) has a simple web interface with which even the most simply trained IT monkey could work out what they want.

The 54-g actually runs linux so you can do flashier things with it if you like that sort of thing (e.g. traffic shapping). But really thats just for eggheads, normal operation doesn't require knowing about its guts. Fret ye not ;-)

Re:

[samharber.livejournal.com]

Identical network cards? as in MAC Addresses?

Re:

[stsquad.livejournal.com]

Identical as in type. IIRC it was an old PC with ISA Network cards. The limitations of ISA being that you cannot gaurentee which card is detected first so it kept getting the WAN and LAN ports confused. I no longer play with ISA based PC's any more for this reason - my hair is thin enough as it is.

Re:

[samharber.livejournal.com]

ISA is evil. Don't blame you for not wanting to play with it.

Re:

[kingandy]

You would have to talk to Alex about that, all I know is that it didn't work. He mostly just shrugged and said "Well, maybe they're the same or something. I'm off now." Still, he gave it a fair old bash, can't complain.