Give or take a few.

I seem to have gotten a lot of things wrapped up enough to make the trip. It was only slightly in doubt, but it did take some doing. Re-arranging corporate travel arrangements to leave for Chi-town from Lost Wages, for example, took two levels of approval. Those of you in corporations might understand the difficulty of that bit of juggling. Changing my outbound Vegas leg from an Austin non-stop to a Love Field 1-stop (Big Swampy) was less difficult, but not easy.

Finding out the Plaza has ONLY dial-up internet access was the next downer. I’m still doing business (that is to say, I’m always doing business) Thursday and Friday, and dial-up just plain don’t hack it no mo’. I’ve always gotten around this by going to Starbucks and using my T-Mobile account there. However, I could only locate one hot-spot downtown that I could be guaranteed of accessing, so that wasn’t going to be an option.

I therefore made a command decision (for which I am justly famous.) I went and got a new Verizon Wireless BroadbandAccess plan and PC card. This is the $79/month unlimited data plan they’ve been touting and it uses their new 3G CDMA EV-DO cellular network. It’s rolled out to only a few cities, but Lost Wages happens to be one of them. A fair number of other cities I cover are in there, too. Testing it here at the house shows downloads at 400kbps and uploads at 130kbps. That’s good enough. Funny how we get dependent on things like hi-speed access, isn’t it?

The really super-nice thing about BroadbandAccess is that I’m no longer bound to Starbucks, Kinko’s, Borders, or any other place with a T-Mobile hot-spot. As I age, I find that I am more and more bothered by background noise. Did I say bothered? I should say, thermonuclear, Guns of Navarone Jules pissed. Starbucks has too much music and blenders and wacky steam blowers and stuff. Kinko’s has copiers running non-stop, of course. Border’s is acceptable, but they are rare enough as to be only marginally useful. However, the Third Space (not work, not home) is invaluable to me in getting my work done. With EV-DO, my Third Space can be anywhere in the cities with coverage. Anywhere. City park, bike trail, Denny’s, dive bar full of the degenerates that I feel so at home with. Hell, the front seat of the Big Red F-150.

I tell ya, I haven’t felt this free since my first pair of silk boxers.