You obviously haven't tried to IRC from UTS. A lot of lame bots
("robots", ie. automated IRC clients) used to get run from UTS accounts,
with the consequence that the administrators of jello (and yamabico)
have banned all connections from UTS to their IRC servers.
The only remaining IRC servers in Australia that I know of that UTS
people can connect to is ircserver.qabc.uq.oz.au (usually reserved for
bots) and tartarus.itd.uts.edu.au (not operating at the moment, so our
very own ftoomsh is sitting in for it).
You really shouldn't connect to overseas servers... not only does it
have long response times, but it counts international net traffic (and
hence dollars) against your machine when it could just as easily be
counted against someone else's :)
PS. I didn't really want to post this yknow---I don't want people
to think of me an IRC addict :>
-- DB