OK, now I’m thinking seriously about this motorcycle thing. Some ideas:

1. I pay $104/mo for a train ticket to and from Savage, 30 minutes from my house.
2. The Penn line runs up until 7:50pm mon-fri.
3. The average time, door-to-door, from my house to the office, is 1 hr. 30 min.
4. Jason S has a 440 cc. Kawasaki sitting in a barn somewhere, which did run but hasn’t in a few years. He’s willing to give it to me to get rid of it. He says it needs some clutch work, a carb cleaning and probably a new tank or filter.
5. The type of bike I’d buy would be a standard bike, meaning not a rice-burner sport bike, not a Harley, and not a 5,000-lb. touring bike. Small, lightweight, and cheap.
6. Motorcycles are pretty good on gas mileage.
7. There is FREE motorcycle parking across the street from the office. FREE.

The drawbacks:

1. I could die.
2. I don’t know how to drive a motorcycle.
3. I could die.
4. I’d need to lay out about $1,000 to get it running, registered, and insured.
5. That would make a grand total of three vehicles in the fleet.
6. There is the strong possibility that the commute could take the same amount of time.
7. Rain.

Hmmm…..

Here is a great overview of PPPoE from Vicomsoft. I also found a site where the guy reviews different networking hardware, with a home-user background. This is actually a troubleshooting page for the Linksys router I’m thinking of buying.

OK, after reading the information on the practicallynetworked site, I decided to go with a different machine- an SMC unit. The SMC is an 8-port switch, autosensing 10/100, and has the additional features of being a windows print server and port mapping. The reasoning is that instead of the DSL modem, a $100 router, then a hub, I’d cut out the hub and get a better deal- an 8-port switch in its place; plus I can share the Laserjet out if I put it on the NT server. I ordered it today from an outfit called Computers4sure.com for $155.