Yes, DSL has made it to the Roberts household. I have been dragged kicking and screaming into about 1998, bandwidth-wise. Oddly enough, it was my wife who forced me to take the plunge. She said it was one thing hobbling along while she was pre-doctoral, but there was no way in heck she would put up with a lack of connectivity in her post-doctoral life, and since the Windows proxy of the dialup connection was never terribly stable, I had an epiphany: I would get DSL and give her my desktop machine, with Linux on it. Since the desktop machine had successfully fried its hard drive over the (wet, moldy) summer, and had to have a new drive (sans OS) anyway, this would be a good excuse for Linux: good firewall, given the existence of ipchains. (Ipchains rocks.)

So mote it be, and thusly we have a Linux box on a fast connection sitting on my wife's desk, and proxying its connection throughout the house. I'm still running Windows on my laptop (which I actually grew to like better than a desktop over the summer -- there is something essentially liberating about being able to unplug your whole machine and go work in the yard or on the beach, and I have actually *done* exactly this on occasion.) Via the magic of open-source software, HTTP, SMTP, and POP3 all proxy out through the Linux box, giving me damned fast access.

It's neat.