Skyline

No, not the car, the track!

Wellington Scottish, the running club I'm a member of, has setup some club runs during the summer. Sure the Harrier season is during the winter so not many turn up but I finally had legs that weren't killed from marathon running, I was well and had time.

It was a great run. We started in Ngaio, went down the Ngaio Gorge a little way then took some shortcuts to get to Wilton Bush. Then it was a fairly solid climb to get up to near Mt Kaukau before heading back to home base. It was a somewhat grueling 2 hour run. My legs are dead the day after.

It was very pleasant to relax back at the Harper/Manchester and have some morning tea.

The photo above was taken very near the highest elevation. Thanks to Paul and www.scottishathletics.org.nz.

Broadband update

So... it turns out that our friends TelstraClear can't put cable in without digging a hole every ten metres down the drive. For those that might care the feeder pole halfway down the drive is too short for them to put cable on. Since the landlord doesn't wish to allow any digging my dream of cable goodness is no more.

So it's time to try ADSL. On my friend Adam's recommendation I've signed up with World Exchange. In theory, it's on at the moment but as I've only just ordered a modem. Hopefully that'll arrive tomorrow or Wednesday and I'll get everything going.

As far as I can tell ADSL must be on. I just attempted to dial up with an ADSL filter on the line. I got the fabulous speed of, wait for it, 2.4kbps. Yep, that's right, we're back to 2400 baud.

Of course, inserting the ADSL filter in line gives a nice speed of 40kbps.

To follow up the PC Online Shop story: it took a bit but my wireless router did turn up safe and sound so good on them.

I had a bit of fun configuring it. I wanted the security to be WPA2 because that has proper grown-up encryption. Then I discovered that running WPA2 on Windows XP requires a special patch; the Intel wireless adapter on my laptop required whole new drivers. Working this out took a bit of research because there were no useful error messages. However, Google is your friend and once everything was installed it all went swimmingly.

I've also found that, in NZ at least, hooking up an external modem to an existing network is a little bit of a challenge. Telecom use a protocol called PPPoA to do authentication. The interesting thing about that decision is that the authentication has to be done on the modem. A seperate router does see the frames to do PPPoA over. Most wireless routers, including mine, include a firewall and other useful security between the Internet and internal sides.

I was originally going to buy a fairly simple ADSL modem and rely on the router to do the security. There's lots of discussion on the net about trying to make it work - mostly unsuccessful.

However, consulting the oracle that is Adam, comes up with the simple solution. Ignore the Internet side of the router, get an ADSL modem with appropriate security and let the router just spread it around.

So roll on Mr. Modem.


Or should I say oboe?


So now I'm breathlessly waiting for my modem.