First Entry From the Train

Happy Friday!

I’m blogging from the train! Ok, maybe that doesn’t warrant a lot of excitement, but today was the first field test of new little hotspot device and it works just grand. So why not post from the train?

I should explain a couple of things. First, by “train” I mean the commuter train Future Husband (FH) and I take to get into work. It’s a nice, fairly reliable ride on the MARC Brunswick Line. Before we moved, I’d only ever ridden the Penn line to get to BWI airport from DC. But the Brunswick line is a little different. It’s got a little more character. Is it because it goes to West Virginia? Maybe. But we shouldn’t make assumptions. At any rate, we’ve been getting used to the commute and getting to know/observe our train neighbors (traibors?).

Second, the hotspot is our little portable wireless network. You might have seen the things that plug into a laptop to provide internet access; this is just a little stand-alone device that’s about the size of a deck of cards. When we were moving and doing all the responsible adult things like transferring our utilities, we realized that we cannot get normal high-speed internet access at our house. This should give you some indication of how far Out There we live. So we shopped around to check out our options, which were the following:

• Satellite internet. You know those tv commercials boasting that EVERYONE can have internet so long as they have a clear view of the north sky? Well for the bargain price of a $500 dish and a minimum of $250 in installation fees AND a monthly subscription of about $80, YOU can have restricted bandwidth internet access at blazing speeds of up to 1.5 mbps.
• Dial up. Just, no.
• Hotspot! Or, you can use your wireless provider to get a discounted device which delivers reliable and reasonable broadband. Granted, it’s a 2-year contract, just like a cell phone, but we can use at the house, on a train, in a box, with a fox, etc. Oh, and we’re limited to 10 GB of data per month, since Verizon ditched its unlimited data plans. But I don’t mind hanging out at the coffee shop using their wireless to download OS X Lion. Don’t mind at all…

So anyway. Where was I going with this? I might have been about to brag about our quasi-hardcore commute. But some future version of me is already preparing an I-told-you-so for the day when the train breaks down, the bus to get us off the train hits a deer, and our truck gets a flat, wherein we arrive home at 1 am. So instead I’ll just say how much I like commuting with FH because he lets me sleep on his shoulder as long as I don’t drool. Oh, and not in a million years would I have moved this far out of the city if I had to drive to work everyday.