Saturday, August 18, 2001

Ahhhhh. I’m finally on broadband.

A Linksys router

After a trip to McLean Bible Church to teach Redemption (nobody showed up), I swung by CompUSA, where I bought a Linksys 4-port router (plus an Envision 15″ LCD monitor). After an hour spent fixing some things at Intersect, I came home and spent the afternoon setting up the router.

Now, all of my machines are using the cable modem connection, even Pendragon running BeOS. It’s wonderful, if only for those 100 KB reference pages which load in a few seconds.

Oh, and the LCD monitor is cool, too. ;-) I wasn’t sure how they’d look sitting on a desktop, but the thing is drop-dead sexy.

While at CompUSA, one of the employees turned around, pointed at the Be logo on my shirt, and asked if I used BeOS. When I confirmed I did, he enthusiastically asked if I knew where he could buy a copy, explaining that he’d downloaded the free demo and loved it and wanted to buy the commercial version. After I directed him to Gobe, he turned to one of his co-workers and evangelized about how cool BeOS is, even using one of my favorite lines, “It’s like halfway between Windows and Mac, with the stability of Linux.”

I must have grinned for ten solid minutes after that exchange. There was no question that the guy was a huge fan of the OS, and to see that sort of infectious enthusiasm was a real charge. It reminded me that one of the reasons I use BeOS is because it creates these sorts of reactions in people.