A blogariffic update

So, after going through a drought of no internet access at home, I tried NetZero. Their 10 hours per month of free service with banner and popup ads sux, but it worked on a spare celery stick, until I decided I had to get away from the constant cycle of Orbitz - Monster.com - NetZero - Get Free $tuff!! Ads. I paid 'em the $9.95 and now I can use their service with my iBook. Of course it needs theri dialer, but some ursory examination leads me to think that they are using SLIP istead of PPP. I'd dearly love a PPP dial-up so that other machines (BSD, old Mac OS, Amiga, whatever) could get on too. The PPP dial-up I used to use worked on everything from my old A2000 to my old WinCE 2.0 palmtop to my old IIci the used to run NetBSD and act as a LAN <-> dial-up gateway to my iBook. Oh well. Back on the grid I guess. One day I'll have me a Mac mini. One day soon, I swear, even if I have to save a $10 or $20 bill per week to do it. It'd be the first new Mac I can buy outright, and only the 4th computer I'd have bought new. I bought a Packard Bell Statesman laptop on clearance from Wal-Mart years ago for $500. I bought the Everex Freestyle A10 PPC on a post-christmas sale for $100 or so, I bought the iBook on a student discount for about $1200, and I'm still paying on it, and I still owe at least twice what it's worth. I'd love to be able to just walk into the Apple Store down on the Country Club Plaza and drop 5 Benjamins and change and walk out with my Mac mini. It would feel so cool, as long as I didn't get mugged by any of the too-cool-to-be-there trendy-ites to steal my new hardware.

And as a small tech note: This post is coming live from my old Toshiba Satellite Pro 410CDT, stock w/ a CD module, 810MB HDD, and getting on the net with a Dell TrueMobile 1150 PCMCIA card. The thing currently runs FreeBSD 4.9, but might soon be a testbed fro NetBSD 2.0 for an article I'm going to write to help revive a tech/hacker journal I used to do a small bit of writing for. So, the net goes from the 410CDT to the Netgear WiFi router, to the hardwired iBook (it's got wireless, but hardwiring it means that there is a lot less WiFi traffic all the time so my SSID that isn't broadcast by the router doesn't show up all day long....) through the custom NetZero dialer and on out to the world. Yippie. And other crap.