Unhooked Continued...

[susandennis]

11:30 am - this could be more frustrating but I'm not sure how...

After the gym, I went over to the nearby independant coffee shop. They have free wifi and also lines to get coffee that nearly snake around the block. I worked for about an hour and finally the line got short enough to stand in for a while. Naturally, as soon as I got my coffee their network crashed.

So I came home and camped in the 3rd floor hallway. (Last night, I scribbled a thank you note and left it in the door of 303 letting them know how much I appreciated their open network. I got a nice email this morning.) But sitting on the floor is not conducive to long term computing and I was running out of juice. The closest outlet was outside of compute range AND my cellphone signal didn't work in the hallway.

I did the minimum and came home. The fucking light on the modem is still red and mocking me. I have reset the thing so I know for sure it's still a dead duck. The technician said yesterday that the onsite work would be done in the window that ends at noon. 26 minutes to go. I'm beginning to worry that this is going to drag out past this afternoon.

Clearly it's time to invest in a backup. Probably a wireless card. I hate spending the money but I hate it a lot less than dialup access.

If I were smart, I'd go get one right now, but I'd like to do a bit of intelligent shopping first and that's hard without decent access!

--

And now I'm back in the hallway only this time it's my own hallway - I'm getting 303's access through the floor. Whew. Travis comes out from my unit now and again to check on me.

This is not a good day to be not available for work. Murphy can suck my toe. I'm waiting now for my latest page update to be checked...

Comments

[ex-nan58.livejournal.com]

That DOES sound frustrating! You are handling it better than I would. Hope things are fixed soon!

[davmoo.livejournal.com]

Be smart. Do your research (I see you've posted on Howard Forums) and then take a leap. What ever you pick, you're stuck with it for two years, so make sure you'll like it :-)

The only thing negative I could say about Verizon Wireless is the price is a bit steep. But the signal is excellent...in fact, I'd be hard pressed to tell you anywhere in my normal "sphere of operation" that it doesn't work. And I don't think its ever been not working since I signed on.

[susandennis]

Do you know anything about 3GStore.Com? I'm thinking about calling them and having a little chat. It appears they sell the hardware and front the providers as well.

Your experience is very encouraging. Thank you giving me the details. Last week, I would have thought it was just too expensive to be worth it.

This week I know just how wrong I was last week!

[davmoo.livejournal.com]

I kind of wince at the expense when I pay the bill each month. Especially since there are occasional months where I don't even take the card out of my laptop bag. And I actually pay slightly more (about $10) for the EVDO service than I do for my broadband cable connection. But its one of those things where the expense of *not* having it can be greater than the expense of having it.

Plus we're coming up on one of the two times of year (the other being spring) where its really nice outside and its great to be able to sit down at the picnic table my neighbor has on our little lake and use the laptop to work. Since my house has steel siding, its impossible to hit my wi-fi router from there, even though I can see the window of the room it sits in.

As for 3gstore.come, I had not heard of them. But after looking, it looks like they've got some neat routers I should be looking through :-)

[susandennis]

Thank you once again. I will, of course, write all the details. Stay tuned!

[steve98052.livejournal.com]

Signal strength is something that varies geographically. We dumped Verizon Wireless as a cell provider partly because their voice service was flaky (but more because their customer service was flaky) and T-Mobile is really strong here. (It's been years; maybe they're better now.) But when we took our T-Mobile on a trip to visit home-town friends, it was not so good.

As for net troubles, I'm really glad I have a neighbor who gave me permission to leech if necessary. It only works in one part of the house, but one net-live computer is better than zero. Too bad Susan's neighbor's signal isn't reliably strong enough.

(And I see in another post that the problem is solve now. Hooray!)

[davmoo.livejournal.com]

That is one disadvantage to living in the country...my neighbor and I would have no problems with one using the other's wi-fi, but the problem is our houses are too far apart. I can only detect his network outside, and then only in certain spots of my yard. Likewise, they can only detect my network in certain parts of their yard. That's also why I don't bother with securing my wireless network...for anyone to leach it, they'd have to pull in to my driveway and come almost all the way up to the house to do it.