Finally. After being grounded behind my desk for I don't know how many months, I am finally back out on travel. Yeah, ok; I don't need to be out here 80% of the time like I was for a 2 year stretch. But some time in the saddle out on the open range is always healthy; at least for me.
If you track the Twitter feed, you'll have noticed the contents of my Pack-Up kit for this week. I brought a lot of gear. Some of it is working out great. Some of it, not so good. Out of necessity, I took along two laptops: the Gateway P6860FX for entertainment, and the HP EliteBook 2730p for work. The HP, as always, is working out fine, but I have not spent a ton of time on it, as my workday (training) activities are leaving me little time to dial back into the home office. The Gateway is working great now as an iTunes player and web-content creation workstation. I also got to watch The Talented Mr. Ripley on the big (17") screen, so that, in some way, justified me having lugged it along.
What the Gateway has not done well, or at least has not done well in conjunction with Windows 7, is play legacy PC games. I tried to get both Freedom Force and Darkstar One to run on the Gateway to no avail. Freedom Force ran, but had a sound glitch and a click-move glitch (when I would click on one spot on the map, the characters would run to a different spot, or the mouse indicator was always the attack symbol, so that whatever I clicked on the cahracters would attack instead of just move or talk-to). It [Freedom Force]lost its chance at survival on my hard drive when I was unable to reliably save content in-game, or load datafiles that I had saved from my campaign. Darkstar One I could not even get to launch.
And so I was off to work on developing more content for the site. Which requires web access in a lot of cases. Which brings me to my next hairball.
First of all, I think any hotel that does not provide free internet access is an atrocious business model. If a Best Western or Days Inn offers it, a business traveler ****hotel like a Hilton is just being greedy by not providing the same, in my opinion. So I have had to rely almost exclusively on my Sprint Sierra AirCard 598U USB Wireless Modem. I have been on travel with the modem before, and it works great. Even in a place like Bridgeport, WV, which is not a major metropolitan hub, my service has been great.
Can Sprint not figure out how to get it right in Baltimore, of all places? I am less than a mile from the airport [BWI]and you would think I was out in the boonies somewhere based on the speed and reliability of my connection. To be truthful, we did have a spot of weather last night, so I'll check my connectivity in the AM and see if the problem is endemic to this area, or if it was the weather that caused all of my woes this morning. [update: it is the next morning, clear skies, and I'm on 1XRTT, not even EV-DO, and my signal strength is between 1 and 2 green blips; for whatever reason my signal was much better the first night in the same hotel room, but has been poor since yesterday).
It has been a while since I used the model of generating my blog posts offline for a later upload. I have been using GoogleDocs as my central draft engine in order to get away from the problem I used to have of starting a blog post on one machine, not being done when it came time to switch workstations, and winding up with a half-dozen half-written article ideas strung out across multiple machines. To say nothing of my lack of motivation to pick up a stream of consciousness some number of weeks old and trying to finish it out.
The lack of free wireless and my spotty 3G connection have forced me back to generating content locally again, at least until I get back to Virginia. The interesting thing this has turned up is the new functionality within Sticky Notes in Windows 7. Sticky Notes now supports text entry, as well as ink (in fact I wrote this post out in that very app). This might now give me a way of putting sticky notes up about article ideas I get while working on a given machine instead of some of the other data repositories I had been forced to use (and lose) under Windows Vista. Now where is that blasted MS Word file again? - Vr/Zeuxidamas..>>