life is strange (or, you don't really want to read this entry).
when i was a sophomore in college (~late 1998), if i was downloading something from the net and my roommates started transferring files, my download would crawl to a halt. (they were running windows, while i used linux. one of the roommates was using linux way before me, so it's not like they were "lame")
this was very frustrating - i had no idea what was wrong. i ended up calling 3com - not expecting any help (since i was running linux). the support guy had me download a dos tool, which i ran, and he had me set the card to half-duplex mode. while i was waiting for it to reboot, he mentioned that he just got red hat, and wanted to learn this linux thing. i forget what i said to him. after my computer finished booting into linux, i tried downloading things and it was fast again!
i have a hard time remembering any other times i've called tech support and they were actually helpful.
anyway, fast forward to 2003. since my lovely powermac suspends, i've gotten used to sleeping with no computers on in my room. now that i have the K6 in my room, i decided to try the swsusp patches. i figured it would be faster in the long run to invest some time in getting a cross compiler working on os x rather than build on the 300 MHz K6. this did not turn out to be the case, however i did get a kernel built and it actually works great.
so well, in fact, that i wanted to use it on my vaio n505 which is having some (un)suspending problems with phoebe (and in fact has never had a working pcmcia when unsuspending). since phoebe seems to have really messed up wavelan drivers, i had to use my 3com 10/100 pcmcia nic with it and nat to my powerbook. due to the convoluted network setup i'm using, i had to do two copies of the kernel/patch etc.: one from the k6 -> powerbook, then powerbook -> vaio. well, the scp to the vaio was going at a *screaming* 6K/s over the 100 mbit link (with nothing else on the link).
to make a long story short it was the same problem as before.
while all that was going on, and the original swsusp, i was still fighting this cross compiler. eventually i got it working, though, and started a kernel build (after the vaio build started). and the cross compile build finished first. yay.
(wasn't this why i got a mac?)
see this is why i said not to read this entry. i should probably get some sleep since it's 8:30 am and i have a bunch of errands to do today.