On Friday, Dr. Wood suggested I download Real VNC to connect remotely. It seemed like just the thing I needed to use my Windows XP laptop to connect to the Linux computer Hubble in the Astro lab.

I downloaded it Friday evening and spent the rest of the weekend scratching my head wondering why it wasn’t working. I thought perhaps the fact that I couldn’t ping fit.edu had something to do with it, so I brought my computer to campus on Saturday and tried from there. From on campus, I could ping the school and Hubble just fine, but VNC still wouldn’t work for me.

Today I brought my laptop to the lab and enlisted the help of anyone around, which just happened to be the wonderful Kyle. He showed me some things with the VNC server, but we still couldn’t get the viewer to work. I asked the even more wonderful Dr. Wood for assistance, but he was just as puzzled. Finally, the fantastically wonderful Isaac tried his hand at it. He explained that due to some security bug, I’ll never be able to get VNC running on Hubble unless we upgrade the OS, which no one is prepared to do. He suggested I install Cygwin on my laptop, which I will try at a later point.

I hate computers.