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?

[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...

[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 :)

[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.