This Week: Pittsburgh, Mifi vs Wifi, Radio Shack, Make Magazine & Halloween
<RAMBLE> This week was just chock full of unexpected stuff. Whereas I had thought I was going to be at home learning about virtualisation in support of an upcoming project I got word that some kind of software sorcery was required at the site of troubled project in Pittsburgh. By the end of the day Wednesday, and with very little notice, I was ensconced in the Omni William Penn hotel in down town Steel Town.
The William Penn is Pittsburgh’s oldest hotel. It’s beautiful inside the lobby and common areas. It’s an Omni so the rooms are well appointed with great beds & flat screen TVs. Being older the rooms aren’t all that large, but they are nice.
Internet access is by way of wifi which costs $9.95/day. Normally I wouldn’t care about such matters as I’d have my trusty Sprint Mifi along in my bag. Part of the argument in getting my employer to pay for the Mifi every month is that I don’t pay for broadband by the night in hotels anymore.
I’ve said many times that I would never buy and iPhone. Well, true to my word…I didn’t….yet one graces my desk anyway. A co-worker gave me his older 3G after he upgraded his family to a set of shiny new iPhone 4s. Call it an effort at recycling.
It’s just over a year ago that I took the plunge and ordered a Sprint 3G Mifi. It was move inspired by a tweet from 
This past week I was called upon to give a demonstration at a TV station in San Diego. The exercise involved flying from Houston to LAX and spending a day in our Burbank office getting the demo gear ready to roll. The next day an associate and I would drive down to San Diego to make the presentation.
When last we left this story our protagonist had returned the Cisco AP to BUY.COM leaving le maison du Graves without functional wifi for about two weeks. Fortunately I was out of town a lot during that period so it wasn’t much of an inconvenience. If anything it gave me some time to evaluate my options regarding replacement gear.