Also, after way too much work, I now have a virtual machine running with VMWare on my computer. The computer goes through my firewall and is appropriately protected from the spammy, virus-filled internet. The virtual machine runs some development software, but mostly runs very few services for maximum security, and goes out with an actual static IP address, not through the firewall. This all took way, way too much time to figure out.
Virtualization is a miraculous thing, and will eventually give programmer/hobbyists like myself the very high-tech equivalent of ponies, rainbows and liquid joy, but configuring and using it has a long, long way to go before that happens. Come to think of it, there's another XKCD comic about that...
