Always Bring Your Wireless Stuff
While I was on the plane to the West Coast, I had the honor to be sitting next to a distinguished public figure. Since I want to honor his privacy, I will not say who he was. We had a brief discussion as we observed that he was reading the Wall Street Journal print edition and I was reading it on the Kindle. I tried to demonstrate the coolness of the Kindle and he was mildly intrigued. For the next 5 hours of flight time, he devoured his WSJ, ripping out many pages, taking copious notes on the torn articles, and filing then in a folder. Try that on a Kindle!
I rented a car from National and wanted to try their in-car navigation system and compare it to my GPS-enabled Google Maps and the VZW Navigator application. The Street Pilot from Garmin behaved like a bad "Saturday Night Live" sketch; it took many minutes to find its satellites and thus, its location. It barked out directions in quick succession: "Turn Right, Turn Right, Recalculating, Turn Left, Turn Left" -- the screen would have an arrow pointing to the right and the voice would say, "Turn left." It was both sad and amusing. 
We finished our meetings and settled into the Continental Presidents Club at the airport to wait a couple of hours for our flight. I connected to the free WiFi network that Continental provides and started to work. The problem was that the effective bandwidth I got through their WiFi was clocked in a not-so-impressive 20 KB/sec. 20KB/sec -- that is so last century!
Cell site on cruise ship saves the day!
Disney Cruise Line Goes Mobile
What a difference three years has made on the Disney “Magic” cruise ship. In the summer of 2004, I was on a family vacation on the Disney “Magic” cruise ship. The Magic is a large luxury liner with all the bells and whistles (and Belles!), large mice (Mickey and Minnie), chipmunks (Chip and Dale), ducks, pirates, large 7-foot dogs, and princesses. My favorite was “Belle.”
We could have called from our staterooms but the charge ($10/minute) seemed like piracy on the high seas. You can only wake up to “Good morning to another magical day at sea on the happiest place on earth!” so many times before you want to jump overboard. We managed to rearrange our flights and arrived home none the worse for wear. This past July (2007), my family once again braved the high seas with the Disney Magic. This time we were enjoying the sites of the
We needed to contact a surgical supply house in We needed frequent contact with various people stateside, while in the middle of the sea and many miles from land. All of this communication was done on our mobile phones. We used Verizon and AT&T phones, no problem. The cruise ship had its own cell site (GSM and CDMA) with satellite connection. The ship was also covered stem to stern with Wifi. We had constant mobile voice, text and e-mail connectivity throughout the cruise. While using this connectivity during a vacation is normally counterproductive to relaxing from the stresses of the work environment, it made our management of a medical emergency less stressful because of the ease of mobile communication.
Picture taken with AT&T BlackJack and transmitted via MMS from the ship
Another blog with a shout out to Carnival Cruise Lines and their wireless service:
http://solokay.blogspot.com/2006/07/carnival-cruise-fun-ships-offer.html
Mobile Campus- CU L8R!
Mobile Campus –
During my recent lecture at my alma mater I had the opportunity to talk to several of the students about their use of mobile technologies. Of course – they all have mobile phones with large text messaging plans. I asked them to rate the importance of various forms of messaging - IM, email, texting, voice.
My semi-scientific pool placed text messaging just below email and ahead of voice and IM. It was not clear where actually talking to someone face to face ranked – but I decided not to ask that question.
Maybe I should text it!
The next big thing they are waiting for - WIFI campus VOIP phones. Providing unlimited calling and texting for half (or less…) of what they ( or Mom and Dad) are paying on their mobile phones.
Other college wireless blog info:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/dartmouth.html
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