I'll be on shortly, Trillian is updating.

Anyone know off the top of your head--if you get a new phone with AT&T and sign up for your next two years--you're not unsigned up just because you return the phone, eh?

ita, you have a thirty-day trial in which to test out the service and phone. If you return the phone within the 30 days, you're only responsible for airtime used. Then you can try a new phone or switch to a different carrier. Last time I checked, this applied to current as well as new customers.

Speaking of AT&T...

AT&T Quietly Offers $10 DSL Plan

Without any sort of fanfare, AT&T Inc. has started offering a broadband Internet service for $10 a month, cheaper than any advertised plan.

The DSL, or digital subscriber line, plan introduced Saturday is part of the concessions made by AT&T to the Federal Communications Commission to get its $86 billion acquisition of BellSouth Corp. approved last December.

The $10 offer is available to customers in the 22-state AT&T service region, which includes former BellSouth areas, who have never had AT&T or BellSouth broadband, spokesman Michael Coe confirmed Monday. Local phone service and a one-year contract are required. The modem is free.

The plan was not mentioned in a Friday news release about AT&T's DSL plans, and is slightly hidden on the AT&T Web site.

Interesting article on hiring technical people.

I resent the implication that staying current in everything is free. It may cost no money, but that's hardly free. Of course, why not hire someone who is current in everything (and good) instead of someone who's not current in everything (and good)? Still...

I had some really good...well, really instructional...interviews and hiring processes at my last job in Michigan. The woman I said wouldn't like working there was gone within a couple months, but my absolute favourite was the guy who applied for position A, and while perfectly qualified for it I still thought he'd be better at B, and like it to boot. He said no, turned our alternate offer down, but was back in a week or so for position B. Now, I don't know why he changed his mind (or if he had it changed for him), but he was fucking good at it.

At the job just previous--I was part of the interview process, but for poorly defined roles, and without any real say so. Random as crap, but not my shop.

OK, say someone has a VPN and a local network with a cable modem that does not have a static IP address. So I think the IP address changes once a week or something. How would such a person get the current IP address when he's away from the office?

I think what I've heard is one would have a server on the network (this is XP pro) would run a process periodically to grab the current IP address, then upload this info to a webserver outside of the network. The person could then grab the file (or whatever) with the new IP address from there, and then manually enter it into Windows networking.

Is this the best way of doing this? My client wants it to be completely automatic, which would require Windows networking to somehow be able to grab the current IP address itself. Is this possible? Otherwise, I think I'll end up telling him, "Hey, if you want it that easy, you gotta pay extra for the static IP address." But I'm just wondering if there's some utility that could automatically refresh the IP address that Windows networking is using for the VPN.

I'm not sure how to do it within Windows products alone, but Timbuktu Pro handles all this automatically. Basically it maintains a server and the Timbuktu client reports as needed so that you can log in. I do this all the time, I just have each of my machines identified by an e-mail address. In Timbuktu I tell the machine I'm using the e-mail address of the machine that I want to connect with, and it does all the work for me and establishes a link. It's also totally crossplatform, which is very handy.

Also a quick google search turns up both of these applications which would seem to automate the process for you.

[link]

[link]

How much is this service? (Busy at the moment, but otherwise I'll google in a bit.)

Timbuktu is remote control software, it's about $89 per machine. I don't think it will truly solve the problem.

The two links seem to be cheap solutions.

Oh, those links look like they might work. Thanks!