The ISP wars were not successful so far. And the situation is getting better: Something in this dreadful world (say, a tree or some other horrible entity) destroyed parts of our leased line. The engineers are still looking for a way to reactivate the connection, but I guess this doesn't work out.
So I am going back some evolutionary steps: I happen to own an old Cisco ISDN router. This gagdet will now connect my LAN to the "intarweb". I was told that this is a good way of handling your life: Don't see problems, see solutions. Well, I do. I think the perfect solution contains me, some bulldozers and a beautiful countryside.
Yet, maybe it's helpful for me if I know a way to set up old Cisco routers via serial consoles. The next entry will be a tutorial about that, so stay tuned.
Quadrics are very interesting. To visualize some of your equations, you should use surf. It works smoothly and allows you to create animations as well as static images. A fellow student has created a web page with some nice gifs.
I am not too familiar with surf, but I have created some files which allow you to draw a paraboloid and a torus. Look for them in my surf directory. The .avi movie you can see there was my first try, but I like it.