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

[Mouse]

>> [...] That everything is now CIDR blocks is another loss; I am not
>> fond of the desupporting of noncontiguous subnet masks, even though
>> I can understand it [...]
> Heh, I'm guessing you've been doing something like that for a very
> long time.

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....)

> I remember "Der Mouse" the Sun god from very early days of the net,
> and I suspect you are one in the same.

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".

> What I've often wondered is why there are so many IT people with the
> same sort of laments and we haven't all collectively built our own
> networks over wireless ?

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?

> I wonder why... FCC rules too strict?

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.

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