Well, I’m now on DSL; I ordered the service last week, got the self-install kit with modem/wireless router two days ago, and the activation notice came today. Installation was seamless: hooking everything up and installing and configuring the software took just 30 minutes. Cancelling my old — and faithful — dialup account at Allvantage took just two minutes more.

At last, my connection speed actually feels “normal.” Now I can pick up my laptop and carry it to the couch to use the internet without trailing that phone line behind me, and the first twinge of bandwidth guilt — that feeling of needing to use all this lightning-fast throughput to download something — is already setting in.

I’d like to be nice and share my wireless connection freely for neighbors to pick up, but of course I’m concerned about monitoring connections for possible security risks, both technical and national. OS X 10.2.8 has a firewall on it, but I’d still like to know who’s connected to my network at any given time. I tried downloading Kismet, but the documentation was incomprehensible. Now I’m trying MacSniffer (OS X graphical frontend for tcpdump output), but of course, that just gives me a raw, unintelligible flood of data. Anyone got solutions for OS X?

Update: Sensibility has taken hold, and it’s all WEP’d now. Thanks for the advice.