Date: Tue, 24 Sep 1996 06:11:00 -0500

From: Natalie Maynor maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]RA.MSSTATE.EDU

Subject: Telnet from Japan (was Re: The Missed Allusion)



FWIW, I live here in Taipei, Taiwan, and just spent a month in California.

Via a $5 intro account (Netcom) I was able to work on all our html pages

remotely. Though slow, it was workable. I was using a 14.4K modem and



The speed of telnet connections depends on more than just the distance,

of course. I've often worked on things here in Mississippi via telnet

from places pretty far away (e.g., Canada) and found it much faster than

it is when I telnet through a local ISP at night because of not being

able to get through the MSU busy signals. (But I pay a flat rate for

the ISP -- no worry about how long I'm online.)



My experiences in telnetting here from Asia (Hong Kong and Singapore)

have been horribly slow, though. I remember finding it impossibly slow

simply to read and answer e-mail from Hong Kong and thus ftp'ing all my

mail to a local machine there, writing replies on it, and then either

sending directly from that machine or ftp'ing the files back to here.



a notebook. Granted the cost of a net account in Japan may be higher

than the states, I believe you would only be paying for the time

connected to a local ISP.



The telephone costs in Tokyo are quite high, according to my colleagues

who have worked there. These people aren't nearly as active in net life

as I am but have still spent fortunes on the phone bills. Even local

calls cost by the minute there, and the ISPs they've used all seem to

have "local" numbers in some different part of Tokyo that jacks the

telephone costs up even higher. I'm hoping that maybe Meisei University's

net presence will improve by the time I get there and that I will perhaps

have decent net access from the campus. (It has occurred to me that I

might be able to barter with them for net privileges in exchange for my

help with the English version of their web pages -- which look pretty

bad right now.) But even if I have campus access, I won't be able to

stay on top of ADS web pages the way I do now. I manually create the

list archives every morning for gopher, ftp, and the web (something that

I can almost certainly get automated via a perl script before leaving,

however). And I add to the web pages of job ads and calls for papers at

least several times a week. The editing and placing of those files takes

enough time that I would be going broke if paying by the minute.



I didn't mean to write this much. I have a bad habit of being too

loquacious in early-morning e-mail. Sometime soon I'll send another

posting with some thoughts on plans for ADS-L and the web/ftp/gopher

pages for next year. ADS-L runs itself for the most part, but I do

get at least a few requests most weeks for help with subscriptions and

do have to deal with list mail that bounces for one reason or another.

If somebody had an address problem next year while I was on a break in

China or Thailand or somewhere, my account could get stuffed with error

messages to the point of becoming unusable.

--Natalie (maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ra.msstate.edu)