TCP/CG

Dick Pountain/14 May 2000/Idealog 70

As I sat down to my first morning's work I opened the wooden shutters of my study window, only to discover that a small scorpion had made its home in there. I didn't regard this as a bad omen, for several reasons. For one, I am not superstitious and so don't believe in omens anyway. For another, it seems rather appropriate to me for a columnist who is always sniping to have a scorpion as his domestic familiar.And for a third, it was a very small scorpion indeed, barely bigger than a woodlouse. I should explain that I'm writing this particular column from a small stone cottage in a valley in the mountains of Umbria, in central Italy, where I intend to finish off my great oeuvre, a dictionary of computing terms. It's a gloriously beautiful valley, and my study window looks out over a mountain covered in green chestnut and oak trees. I expect even the scorpion is impressed.

The only, er, arachnid in the ointment is that the phone line that I'd been expecting to work, doesn't. It's been cut off due to a bureaucratic cock up, and after visiting the telecom offices in Arezzo I'm told that I need to open a new account from scratch. Which might happen sometime 'piu tardi'. This is a bummer because not only do I really need Web access for looking things up, but I also have to edit the Real World section of this issue of PC Pro, starting tomorrow. With a phone line, that wouldn't have been a problem. I have my new desktop-replacement notebook on my desk, with Ameol installed and a modem, and even the parallel port Zip drive that I use to back up each day's dictionary entries. Being a very paranoid person indeed when it comes to my data, I like to carry a Zip disk containing the database whenever I leave the house unattended: they might get my computer but they'll never get my data, be they burglars, arsonists, meteorites or bolts of lightning.

That Zip drive turned out eventually to be my salvation. Very fortunately for me - though by no means a coincidence - my nearest neighbour here is a very old friend from England who now resides here permanently. G, as I shall call him, is an artist, animator and designer and, with his wife C (an illustrator), runs a residential school teaching 3D graphics to a very high standard. For many years G was entirely Mac based, using Electric Image and writing his own filters for Renderman, but recently he purchased one of Silicon Graphics' Intel-based workstations, running Windows NT, Maya and 3D Studio Max, and it turns out to have a built-in Zip drive. On hearing of my loss of phone, G immediately offered me the use of his, but I could see that he has only one data line himself (connecting a Mac via modem to an ISP in Arezzo) and has a business to run. The Mac put paid to any chance of installing Ameol, and though I could in theory telnet into CIX and get my messages using fdl from the command line, as in the dark pre-Ameol days, first of all I've almost forgotten how to do it and secondly I didn't want bits of my message base on G's machine. The least disruptive route for G was to give me a mailbox called dick at his address, and have all the Real World contributors mail their copy to that instead of CIX, so it would come down (into Mac Outlook 8) with his own mail each day.

I should explain that though G is, topographically-speaking, my next-door neighbour, he still lives around 20 minutes walk away from my cottage, in an old customs house down the valley. It's a magnificent walk, the verges filled with poppies and rock roses and purple orchids and wild hyacinths, but it's still a bit of a schlep whenever you need to log on. Fortune again smiles though, because I have at my disposal here a small Honda motorcycle, a CG125 to be exact. And so it is that I invented the TCP/CG protocol, in which the transport layer for the 'last mile' is a small red motorcycle and the packet is a Zip disk sitting in my shirt pocket. G has all his machines networked together using Appleshare, and so as soon as I arrive I bung the disk in the Zip drive of the Silicon Graphics, trying not to disturb the charming and patient American student who is animating an alarmingly realistic human figure on it.

Then I go to a Mac in another room and do my mail business in Outlook, sending all the copy I retrieve over the network to my Zip disk. It goes back in my pocket, I go back on the Honda, and we both buzz up the 1-in-3 dirt drive to the main road, my feet trailing like a speedway rider and its back wheel shimmying from side to side on the loose stones. Within 5 minutes I'm back at my desk, looking out over the scorpion and the mountain, and bashing away at the RWC columns. It's a dirty business but someone has to do it, and I'm very glad that's it's me. That's really all I have time for now as I'm due to go to a live sex show at sunset - though I must disappoint you by revealing that all the performers are bullfrogs in the lake at the bottom of the track. Still you wouldn't believe the stuff they get up to, three-in-a-weed-bed, you name it....