Salt Water

Well, it's a way of celebrating our safe arrival in Nova Scotia... as I type this the sun is setting over the Atlantic ocean outside the window. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about... I apologise, for my regulars, particularly the one's who wished us a safe move, we're finally here.

Apart from snow in Buffalo... there's always snow in Buffalo, we had clear but very cold weather on the road and managed to slip into New England and around the corner in between storms.

To keep things in their proper perspective the kids (4 cats and 3 dogs) survived the trip extremely well and the computer systems came to no harm either. A whole new set of locals are now beginning to understand the expression... Mad Dogs and Englishmen!

This week I want to tie up some more loose ends.

In past weeks I've made mention of taking the opportunity to make some changes to our computer systems ready for the arrival here. Most particularly to start using a LAN (Local Area Network) and to capitalise on this by using one telephone line only and Internet connection sharing.

I mentioned this in my Is Anybody There article. I'm happy to report that both the SOHOware networking kit and the Sygate Internet sharing software installed perfectly the first time and in both cases the instructions were very easy to follow. I'm making a point of giving both companies the good news... why just tell them when the news is bad?

As I'm typing this article, and flipping back to my Suite 101 pages as needed, Dee is busy downloading the latest version of Netscape Communicator for her system. The difference is we're only using my faster modem and the one connection... quite fascinating really.

Where we are now is quite remote so we don't have access yet to a cable modem or high speed (DSL) telephone line and the line isn't the fastest around. Despite that everything is humming along quite nicely.

For safety sake we backed up each entire hard drive to the other system which took no time at all. If you have more than system in the household this is definitely the way to go. The cost is quite modest and will pay for itself quite quickly.

Making the necessary changes to Windows 98 to accommodate the network was no real problem but quite typically far more was set up than was either needed or advisable. This required some changes to ensure sharing files and resources was restricted to Dee and me and to nobody else... certainly not the Internet.

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