History [was Re: strangest systems I've sent email from]

Well, I was doing it a long time ago; I stopped doing it when I stopped using the address space I was doing it with. It was always something I did out of convenience rather than because I specifically wanted to run a noncontiguous subnet mask. (I used what we would now call a /29 from my then-employer, with whom I had a private link to home; then I ran out of addresses, and, rather than renumber, I just grabbed another /29 that differed from my first one by only one bit and configured my interfaces with 255.255.255.216 as a subnet mask. I was the assignment authority for the relevant subnet at the time....) Well, I think "Sun god" is a significant overstatement, and I'm pretty sure I never capitalized the "der", but yes, that was me. In approximately chronological order, mcgill-vision!mouse, mouse at mcrcim.mcgill.edu, mouse at cim.mcgill.ca, mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca, and now mouse at rodents-montreal.org.... I stole the "der" from German before I knew enough German to know what I was doing. Some people mistook it for a first name, some mistook it for a title (a la "Dr." or "Mr." or "Ms."), some recognized it as a German article and then tried to "correct" the rest (which was never supposed to be German, but "mouse" in German is "maus", and takes "die" rather than "der" or "das"). Eventually I decided the historical attachment to it wasn't worth the confusion it was producing and stopped using it, going with just "Mouse". The crazy patchwork quilt of regulations applying to amateur use of radio spectrum, is my guess. Now, I would add the depressingly high chance of being invaded by the masses if/when we build something big enough to be useful. We've already built one network only to have it invaded and overrun; why would we expect anything different to happen to the new one? And its sister organizations in non-USA jurisdictions, yes, that would be part of it, I would guess. Many of them demand that the ham accept responsibility for all traffic sent by that ham's equipment, which would be death on forwarding packets for anyone else. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B