Loading ...Caffein Culture and Wifi Wanderings
My caffein-addled brain is on a tear. I often get this way, even when I’m just drinking decaf. Something about coffee sets my mind in motion. Caffeine just adds some speed. I have been out all morning (and part of the afternoon) wondering my neighborhood of Adams Morgan in DC as well as a bit south into the Dupont Circle neighborhood. It is the perfect day to do this. There is no humidity, it is warm, but with a nice breeze. Perfectly blue sky and sunny. It’s also a Sunday morning where lots of other folks like me are out just enjoying a lazy Sunday before the workweek starts again tomorrow. If only life were a perpetual series of Sundays like this. I could get used to it. Then again, experience seems to show that days like this have such value because they are not so ordinary. If every day were like this, perhaps it would just be boring. Or at least we’d take it for granted much more. I remember a year or two ago there were big swaths of time during the spring and/or summer where the weather was just as perfect as today. I would take every opportunity to be outside. I’m sure there were days where I stayed inside despite not having to, but I do remember always thinking, “Take advantage of it!”
Anyway, I’m reading a book on espresso which is quite good, but which I’ll post a review when I’m done (hopefully within a couple of weeks). The ability to sit at a sidewalk cafe, people watch, read, surf the Internet, and even make a little small talk with strangers next to you, is something that is so nice. I’m a fairly shy person and so have spent a lot of my weekends going to public places like these because it feels like although I may not be a part of some social event, I am at least part of the world at large if even as an observer. At least I’m not shut up in some small apartment watching the NOT Real World on TV. Even now that I am getting married, I still enjoy the opportunity to get out on my own (my fiancée is away this weekend) and soak in the sensations of neighborhood life without any time constraints, or need to focus all one’s attention on one thing.
Speaking of caffein, I have the odd site of a giant automated convenience store or vending machine right near where I live in Adams Morgan. Up until today I had only used it once - to rent a dvd just for the heck of it. But they have all kinds of items from eggs and milk to contraceptives and more. Walking by it today I decided to take a quick look since I haven’t really looked at it carefully since they redesigned and restocked it several months ago. I happened upon a product that I’d never seen before which I felt I had to try. It was sugar-free Red Bull. Red Bull is one of these so-called “energy drinks” which mixes caffein, sugar and perhaps other stimulants, and give one a “jolt of energy” - since our lives aren’t already fast-paced enough, huh? But being a low-carber, I don’t beverages with sugar. Actually I swore off even diet sodas a couple of years ago because the carbonation and other chemicals they put in them are not very good for you and besides probably hinder weight loss. But sugar free Red Bull I just had to try. I’ve heard Red Bull is horrible tasting. I doubt I will ever drink this stuff again, but I thought I could at least try it. I’ll wait till tomorrow morning though, as I’m already sufficiently caffeinated for the next 16 hours!
I mentioned surfing the Internet, so I thought I’d elaborate a little on this. I have a phone that lets me browse the web, send and receive email, and send and receive instant messages as long as I can receive a signal (which is often very easy in the middle of DC, but sometimes surprisingly fickle). Although the screen is small, black and white, and won’t let me visit just any page, it will do in a snap. I eagerly await the day when I upgrade to a device that has a slightly larger color screen that has fewer limitations in what pages it can load, has a faster speed, and can even do wifi. Wifi, for those not familiar, is another word for wireless networking. You see this mostly in laptops, but an increasing number of smaller devices like Palmpilots, PocketPC’s, etc. are starting to incorporate the capability with varying degrees of success. Of course you can also put a wireless network card in a full-blown desktop PC and thus avoid having to deal with all the ugly wires.
Anyway, I do have a laptop and will take this out to do some work (I do freelance web development in addition to my fulltime job as a web developer) since it’s often more fun - although usually also more distracting - than sitting at home. There are a bunch of different wifi networks out there that provide services at various locations. I have a subscription with one of the largest of these, the so-called Hotspot service from Tmobile. Since my phone is through them, I pay a discounted rate of $20/month. I haven’t tried to break this down to a per-minute or per-hour cost yet. My guess is that since I’ve had my laptop, I’ve spent an average of maybe 15 hours per month give or take, which would mean this costs about $1.33/hour. This compares favorably to all the other networks out there, except ones that are free of course! There are free access points around, but I’ve heard about more in New York (Bryant Park and Union Square) than I have in DC.
I wonder if eventually we will see public wifi access points in every city (and perhaps even small towns) that are sponsored by taxpayer money? Probably the user base of such services is not quite there yet, although given a few years we may see every phone, laptop, pda, and even desktop computer that is manufactured have a built in wifi card. Also, most wifi networks are still using the older protocol of 802.11b, which has a range of around 150 ft and a speed of 11mbps (really 4mps in the real world). 802.11g, a newer standard introduced last year as a stopgap before a real next-generation standard is agreed to, has not quite taken off, despite being backward compatible with 802.11b. This newer standard offers 55mbps (around 20mbps in the real world) and longer ranges. By the way, MBPS stands for Mega (million) Bits Per Second. Modems currently top out around 56K, or 56 Kilo (thousand) bits per second, so 4mps is still about 70 times faster than a 56K modem! But speed in and of itself, while nice, is not the be all and end all, at least for me right now. When people start using their devices to hold impromptu video teleconferences, or just phone conversations, or to download and watch live HDTV or dvd-quality movies or tv shows, etc., then speed will definitely become a factor. But for now speed FOR ME is secondary to range. With the next generation standards, we could see ranges of 1/4 of a mile or more for a single access point. What this means is that a city could buy 100 or 200 access points (perhaps a little more for really large cities), or smaller towns could buy a half dozen and voilà, instant access for everyone! So, how would this work? It could be done on a federal basis that would ensure access everywhere (even along lonely highways in very sparsely populated areas of Nevada or Wyoming), or it would all be on a local or state basis. States could pay for it via taxes, and perhaps could charge non-residents extra and make some additional money. In addition to tourism dollars, why not make some cybertourism dollars? I don’t know, maybe that type of system would be too complex. But would letting the federal gov’t institute it make for very slow progress as new technologies develop? Or would it simply be an area that people don’t want the feds involved in now that they are already taking away more of our privacy? Private industry will make things happen much faster, we will just have to pay more. Maybe the state/local plan would be a good compromise, but then again more rural/poorer areas would not be served as well..
If you would like to look at what kind of establishments around you offer wifi, here are just a few of the many sites to check out:
- http://www.hotspot-locations.com/
- http://www.hotspotlist.com/
- http://www.makewirelesswork.com/directory.htm (no longer available)
- http://www.wifinder.com/
Here are a few wifi commercial (read not free) networks aside from Tmobile’s mentioned above: