Inasmuch as…

Inasmuch as DSL is usually seen as “always on”, it beggars imagination that imagine.ie drops the connection once every 24 hours for “billing purposes”. It’s just too bad about the SSH, IRC, Citrix, remote backups and other types of connections that you happen to have running at the time.

The time of day when providing a service is secondary to billing for it also drifts a little. Their technical support’s best advice? Turn the modem off then on again at the time that’s least disruptive so the daily dropout hurts less when it happens every 24 hours (plus drift) after that.

I’ve finished the twelve-month term for which I signed up so now I’m shopping for a new ISP. And I know one question I’ll be asking the next one.

Inasmuch as I finally acquired the domain name, this walking shadow as now wandered over to  http://inasmuch.as/.  (more…)

I must be a netizen of the world: I receive emails in Russian that I can’t read, offers of earthmoving equipment in Singapore, discounts for Tim Hortons in Canada, and security warnings for accounts that I never knew I had at nearly every major bank in the English-speaking world.

Maybe it’s this innate netizen-of-the-worldliness that prompts many kind people to offer to share their inheritances with me.  Though I do worry about my health, since there must be a reason why I also receive offers for so many different pharmaceuticals.

The replacement for my venerable Fujitsu P1120 is a Fujitsu P1630 running Ubuntu 8.10.

The netbook form-factor was important to me long before the term “netbook” was a twinkle in a marketing person’s eye, (more…)

I quite like the online Japanese dictionary at http://jisho.org/.  I found it when I was checking the spelling of the name I gave my new laptop.  In this age of netbooks with the same form factor, even though I need the extra horsepower and much as I like it, I call the laptop takai.

Banks like to trumpet the speed of their online banking services.  Ha!  Electronic transfers takes 3-4 working days, unless you pay extra to stop the bank from holding onto your money. (more…)

The W3C Japanese Layout Task Force (JLTF) has a working draft of “Requirements of Japanese Text Layout” available at http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-jlreq-20081015/.

It is an impressive body of work that the JLTF has been working on for a while.  This is the current iteration of the document for which I went to a meeting in Tokyo last September, and I went to the W3C Technical Plenary in Mandelieu this week specifically for the JLTF meeting  reviewing the working draft.

The task force is looking for feedback (to www-i18n-comments@w3.org) by 15 November 2008.

I was at the National Print Museum in Dublin for their open day last weekend, and I’ll be back there next weekend for a workshop on letterpress printing.

It took two upgrade cycles — from 7.04 to 7.10 then from 7.10 to 7.04 — to upgrade the P1120 to Xubuntu 8.04. Neither went smoothly (more…)

Translation: I came, I saw, I posted about it on a collaborative site.

Cf. Wiki, Vidi, Veni (Place or event reviewed on a collaborative site, I saw, I came)