Internet at 80mph

[cos]

Last night, dahling drove me to Rensselaer. As usual, I had my laptop and cell phone to get it online. I'm not used to being the passenger on a long car ride, but I actually got work done on the mass pike! Until my battery ran low and I shut down.

Today, 6 people in a van, heading to Rochester... and they have a car AC adapter. It plugs into the cigarette lighter, and I plug my laptop into it and charge. But this time, I'm not the only one with a laptop out, so someone asks the question: "Can you let us connect to the Internet through your wireless?"

Well, yes, it turns out I can. So now three of us are online, and of course, all posting to LJ. I'm even broadcasting the SSID, so a car keeping pace with us could get on my network too. "This would be useful for a convoy" says beowabbit :)

Comments

[ellipticcurve.livejournal.com]

I hereby utterly discard any pretentions towards geekdom that I may have had. I bow before you, for you are TURBO-GEEK.

*awe*

[superfinemind.livejournal.com]

When I went to Canada with the fencing team, there were some four or so vans, and being RPI folks, there were at least three laptops in each van. In addition to holding powerpoint insults up to the windows, we thought we'd discovered a wireless anomaly in the wilds of Deep Upstate-- when in fact, it was just the Thinkpads' laptop-to-laptop interfacing ability picking up from one van to the next.

Yay technology! ^_^

What's going on in Rochester?

[cos]

Heh! And we've created a wireless anomaly in the wilds of upstate :)

[roamin-umpire.livejournal.com]

Damn... the fencing club has decidedly gotten bigger since I led the expeditions up to Kingston. We only had two vans. (Although, come to think of it, they were 15-passenger vans, which I think are no longer allowed.) The insults remain, however. (We didn't have electronica to facilitate them, but we made do. Or, well, other folks did - I was driving.)

[superfinemind.livejournal.com]

The powerpoint insults were pretty hilarious. I don't remember all of them, but it was things like "You - Suck" on alternating screens, followed by "You suck more" or "your mom sucks" or whatever. The best one, though, everybody agreed, was after one van put one up that was clearly too long for one screen, and somebody else held up a screen that flashed, "Use font - larger than - penis"

...And of course, you can probably guess exactly when the head coach happened to look at it.

Our vans weren't particularly full, though I don't recall how many people we had.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

it's the broadcasting the ssid part that makes it fabulous, i think.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

reminds me of a bunch of friends en route to disneyworld a couple years ago. they were snarfing random wireless on the way down.

[xthread.livejournal.com]

You are very silly people.
But you knew that.

Did you keep an eye out to see if anyone started pacing you so that they could get to the internet too?

[purpleminute.livejournal.com]

it could be useful if i was in the car next to you in traffic...

[cos]

I wish you were! You should be with us this weekend!

[purpleminute.livejournal.com]

:)

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

Say hi to beowabbit for me. I haven't seen him in several years.

[scromp.livejournal.com]

Ski trip to Colorado, 2002, 2 cars:

a
b
c

I had vmware running a freebsd instance on the laptop with irc, httpd, various other things. When we shut the cars down for a long time, we could just pause the vm and restart it later and the connections and everything were still live.

We wrote the ssid on the dust on the back of the cars :)

[cos]

Was it a local network between your two cars, or did you have it connected to the world?
How close did the two cars have to stay to each other to remain connected?

[scromp.livejournal.com]

It was primarily used as a local network, so we could chatter on irc as we went along, and there was some project we were supposed to be collaborating on at the time which I do not remember. I did have somewhat crappy gprs that we turned on from time to time for net access, but demand was generally low since it gets kind of spotty out in the middle of nowhere.

We played with the range a good bit. We could get out to about a quarter of a mile separation (estimated) if the road was clear and flat. Any hills or intervening tractor trailers would cause an immediate disruption at that range. For normal caravan type distances it was very usable even in traffic.

The wap was in my truck, on the dash as you can see, and I usually followed the van, so there wasn't a lot of metal in between the wap and the laptops. It probably wouldn't have worked quite as well if I was leading.

[entrope.livejournal.com]

Awwwwww. :) That's one of the cutest geek tales I've ever heard.

Enjoy yourselves and say hello to everyone for us.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

That works on trains too. Not as well as the in-train infrastructure wifi if the train has it, but my phone is cheaper and available equally on all trains :)

[lil-brown-bat.livejournal.com]

Fucksake. Hang up and drive.

[cos]

Reading comprehension problem? A van with 6 people, and you expect all of us to drive? At the same time? I don't get it.

[lil-brown-bat.livejournal.com]

I guess you've never seen the bumper sticker ("Hang up and drive"). Obviously I didn't mean literally hang up and drive. It just makes me shake my head a wee little bit how so many computer-philes seem on a constant quest to remain (to steal a phrase from Neal Stephenson) goggled in at all possible times. The idea of a van driving down the highway full of passengers posting to LJ just seems a little eerie.

[cos]

I've seen it, but I interpret it the way most people who say it or sport such a sticker mean it: they want the driver to pay attention to the road. The idea that there's something negative about passengers in the car having fun (with Internet or anything else) totally boggles mind (and I'm glad it does).

[lil-brown-bat.livejournal.com]

Well, that's not what I said, and I'm not sure how you'd get that from the word "eerie", but I'm sorry if you perceived that I wanted to squash your fun. My thought was, rather, that as much as I like convenient net access, I think in general most net.people would benefit from less time online and more time in the real world. MYOB, I know...