Tag: technology

VPN

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

In an effort to become an even better domestic network administrator, I
finally managed to setup a VPN this
afternoon.  The VPN lets me call up any other computer’s monitor on the
local network or, put another way, I no longer have to traipse my lazy bones to
another room if I want to spy on what Ph. is doing on the internets. 
Spying, parenting, call it what you want (split hairs only if you must). 
The VPN is terrific for other stuff, too.  For example, given that Ph.’s
clunky old computer is password protected, I can simply veepen (VPN) his
mo-chine (his desktop pops up on my desktop) and type in the password without
ever leaving my seat.  Nifty. Also good for remotely running maintenance,
like ad-aware and spybot apps.

I should probably acknowledge that the setup was possible only with a
generous lent-hand from my
brother. When
we were in Detroit last weekend, he recommended VPN as a solution to a few of
the headaches I was describing to him.  I downloaded it and tried to
install it myself late last week: a plentitude of time-out errors. I could get
the local system to ping, but the VPN wouldn’t work. And I could not isolate the
cause of the error.  Tried everything I could think of.  Today, I
called my brother (he was at my nephews soccer match and so had to call me
back.) After a half hour on the phone this afternoon, both of us were still
stumped.  And then J. asked me whether Windows Firewall was on. 
Me: "Um. No. I’m sure it’s off. I use something else."  But I checked it
anyway because nothing else was fixing the mess, and sure enough, Windows,
kindly bowling over its numb-skull users, had quietly reactivated the firewall
during the last update.  Once I turned it off, the VPN worked, magically
porting Ph.’s computer monitor onto my own. 

Added irony: I was reading and making notes on Norman’s
Design of
Everyday Things before and after the debacle.

Lloyd-Jones on Centrality

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

In "A View from the Center," his 1977 CCCC keynote address, here’s what
Richard Lloyd-Jones said about Mrs. Peterson, "the emblem" of those in his
audience:

Some will share a memory with me–the recollection of picking up the phone,
cranking one long ring, and getting "central." You could ring various
combinations of shorts and longs and get specific subscribers directly, but if
you really wanted to know what was going on in the village you rang
"central."

The folks in bigger towns, which had numbers, had to call central in order
to be hooked up to anybody else on the system, but their central didn’t know
much except numbers, and out central had a name–Mrs. Peterson–and she knew
all sorts of things. Somehow, in the village, she knew who was at the
bank, who had gone down to the ice house, who hadn’t been feeling well.
I don’t know that she listened in on all the conversations, but we supposed
so. She just made herself central in the life of the community. In our more
urban and perhaps urbane way, we would think of her as a communication nexus,
but we’d to better to remember Mrs. Peterson as Central. (49)

Compositionist as pastoral telephone operator. A communication nexus.
This isn’t the only metaphor Lloyd-Jones invokes in the talk, but it is the
piece that resonates most with network studies. Whatever her methods
(eavesdropping? Mrs. Peterson!), she is knowing because of a high degree of
centrality, her niche in a reasonably sized network. When network
become too large, the connector’s knowledge diminishes. Thresholds: Central
knows only numbers in densely populated areas.

Nothing to add beyond that. Just reading for exams,
posting notes,
and thinking Lloyd-Jones was talking about network centrality in his address out
in Kansas City some years ago.