Fill in the usual excuses here. <G>

8:30 The prodigal son returns. Stop by Tom's place and welcome him back.

So, other than that bright spot in the world, things are OK. After my rant last week I discovered that my boss occasionally reads this page (Hi!) and maybe - just maybe - someone listened. We'll see. Either way, it looks like there are some interesting projects in the future - more details as time allows.

Spent a bit of time this weekend working on VPN support in Windows 2000 Server. Interesting application. The setup wasn't TOO complicated, but it was confusing. It's wizard-based, of course - what isn't, these days? - and many of the dialogs are in serious need of a rewrite. Not a great design there.

Once I managed to get it configured, though, it worked pretty well. Performance wasn't bad - for a VPN running on a mcahine with insufficient processor, RAM, or bandwidth - and it really did have lots of power behind the scenes. You can specify which routes you'd like clients to use, including DHCP or static routes, and just about every security feature you might like to tweak is accessible. I still need to experiment a bit with the encryption - I'd like to see if I could use Public Key, which would eliminate the need for authentication. Supposedly it's possible, but I'm not sure what lengths I'm willing ot go to to get it.

And with that, it's time for the weather. Tom?

No update.

Still too lazy.

8:30 AM I was going to post last night, but I relaxed instead. Silly of me, I know. I was reintroduced to an old game I used to love, back in my dial-up BBS days - Trade Wars 2002. Amazing how relaxing it is to play a network-based, multi-player role playing game with no graphics beyond ANSI text, that looks exactly the same over a T1 direct net connection as it did over my 2400 baud modem 10 years ago.

But, sadly, this morning rolled around anyway, and instead of getting dressed for school, I had to come here for work. About the only good thing about that is no one here complains if I have Mountain Dew for breakfast. (But don't tell Keri.)

Friday. A day full of meetings, phone calls, and wasted effort. Still, I'm going to sneak in some time on Linux. I've gotten this set up the way I want it; my Windows 2000 workstation with an SSH session over to the Mandrake 7.02 box. It's nice because I can browse the net in Windows, and copy/paste useful scripts and perl code directly to the Linux box, which is running most of my network monitoring and so on. I don't have to hit the button on the KVM switch just to see who that email is from, I can open Word documents and view them while coding, all sorts of fun things. Add in the terminal server to the my various Windows 2000 Servers and I spend more time on other machines than on my own - yet all without leaving my desktop. Kind of fun.

Well, I've put this off long enough. Time for another meeting. Sigh.