It’s been a disastrous couple of days as far as Internet connectivity goes. My hotel has wireless, but it’s like a slow dialup. I can load static pages, but I get timeouts on getting mail. Worse, anything with a script times times. Which means no blogging. Worse yet (at least for me), it means that I can’t fight the human offal that have been spamming me. I’ve gotten hundreds of spam pings in the last couple days, and I haven’t even been able to blacklist them, let alone delete the offending graffitti. The connectivity at the symposium was flaky as well.

Anyway, I’m at a Barnes and Noble now, paying for an AT&T connection by the hour.

It’s worth it, but I see that I have to get a wireless card, so I’m not dependent on the whims of hotels with false advertising about their Internet capabilities.

Things worked out better than I expected. I managed to get an earlier flight from Dallas to El Paso, and when I got there, Advantage had a car (for the bargain price of only a hundred bucks a day, including all of the outrageous taxes and fees they put on rental cars these days).

I’m in my room now, and the broadband seems to work, sort of, though it seems more like narrow band.

I stupidly made air and hotel reservations for this week, but not car rental. No one has anything. Which should have been obvious. I thought about the difficulty of staying in Las Cruces, and got a hotel in El Paso, but it didn’t occur to me (as it should have) that everyone would be flying into El Paso and renting cars there.

Is anyone going there this week, and staying in El Paso, from whom I could bum a ride for five days? Including tomorrow afternoon, when I get in?

I’m off to DC for a couple days. I do plan to come up with some thoughts on the (sort of) new administration space policy, though, here or elsewhere.

…and hotels for that matter, that advertise free high-speed wireless Internet access. You often get what you pay for, which is not in fact actual high-speed Internet access, but rather, simply a connection that might pass a packet or two, one way or another, when it can be bothered to get around to it.

We’re on the fourth floor of a condo that has a wireless router in the lobby. In the afternoon, when everyone is out on the beach, it works fine. In the evening, when they’re all home, checking email, browsing for dive sites, browsing for the latest news on the playoffs, browsing for pr0n, etc., it’s…not. I can make no connection, and the wireless widget tells me that I have a low signal.

Now I’m not an expert on the 802 protocol, but I’m guessing that this is what’s happening.

The signal strength is a minor factor. When it tells me it’s getting a weak signal, what’s really happening is that it’s having trouble getting packets through, and interpreting that as a weak signal. When everyone is on line at once, those with the actual strongest signal (i.e., those nearest the lobby, which doesn’t include those on the fourth fargin’ floor) are grabbing all the opportunities to send/receive packets before my (relatively) weak signal can even get its boots on. The place needs more bandwidth, but doesn’t realize it, or doesn’t care. When there’s plenty of available bandwidth, my “signal strength” is fine, because there’s no competition.

For those who are wireless gurus, is that the deal?

I’m still alive. We’re staying down at the Kona Waipolua Hilton, and I had to fly over to Honolulu today to talk about Hawaiian spaceports. And it looks like the Tigers are going to continue to blow their once-promising season.

Time to fission. It’s me, Sam, saying I am signing off for good over here at Transterrestrial. Check out my new blog at Decisive Win.

Au revoir.

OK, I said we were going to Kona, and we did fly into there. But we are actually staying (at least this weekend) in a house in Honoka’a, on a hillside overlooking the ocean. The Kona side was hot and muggy. I wasn’t impressed. It seemed like Florida, except much more scenic. But as we drove through Waimea, the landscape turned from lava desert to lush green hillsides, and it drizzled and cooled. So far, despite the clouds and rain, I like the northeast side of the island much better. We’ll probably go down the coast to Hilo today, and perhaps up Mauna Kea. We won’t be able to do that after we dive, so we’ll probably get the high-altitude stuff out of the way.

Oh, and to the commenter in the other post who recommended Poncho and Lefties?

Why? I read a review in a guidebook that consisted pretty much of the phrase “If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.” What’s the appeal?

We’re going to Kona for a few days (back a week from Monday). Hopefully the Atlantic won’t act up while we’re gone. It’s been a surprisingly quiet season, so it figures that some storm will probably brew up in the Bahamas at the last minute next week, and we won’t be here to shutter.

Anyway, I’ll be checking in occasionally, but I suspect that posting may be lighter than usual.

[Update at 6 PM PDT]

Arrived in LA. We fly to the big island tomorrow morning.

I am increasingly running into problems with email communications. My normal posting style (as established by ancient Internet rules, and my email software configuration (Eudora)) is that the response comes above, and I reply below. Unfortunately, many people seem to have adapted the Microsoft/AOL/Morondujour standard of top responding. This becomes a mess when engaged with an extended email discussion between two people of differing protocols.

I find it very frustrating to do a top post, but if I don’t, then it becomes very difficult to find the history of the exchange, since they switch back and forth.

Is there a solution to this problem?