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<\/a><\/p>\nWe are down at the beach house for the weekend. For the story of how we acquired a beach house, and last year\u2019s communications problems, see http:\/\/www.chaosmanorreviews.com\/oa\/2011\/20110711_col.php<\/a>.<\/p>\n When you are on the road nowadays you are seldom far from some kind of Wifi connection. Hotels, airport waiting rooms and particularly airline lounge clubs, coffee shops \u2013 there are Wifi networks everywhere, but as luck would have it, there isn\u2019t one anywhere near our beach condo. I used to have cable modem, but for good and sufficient reasons that\u2019s not an option right now. Last year I solved the problem using the AT&T USB Connect 900, which I bought in the local AT&T store. The device looks like a large thumb drive, and it connects to a USB port, where it functions sort of like a cell phone. In fact, it really is a 3G cellphone, and actually has a cell phone number.<\/p>\n When you get the Connect 900 you choose a data plan. You can choose to pay a monthly rate, but since you aren\u2019t likely to use this when you have another option, that probably doesn\u2019t make sense for most people. One option is a $50 prepayment. That\u2019s good for one month or 5 GB of data, whichever gets used up first. After that, the Connect 900 will still connect to AT&T, and it will offer you the opportunity to buy more time or more gigabytes. I know that works because I have done it.<\/p>\n This time it didn\u2019t work. I plugged in the Connect 900, it called home and connected to AT&T, then opened my browser, and a friendly message told me hello, please log in and buy some more time. AT&T even told me my log in name. It only wanted my password. That should have been all right. I had that written down in my log book, and for that matter the ThinkPad remembered the password because I had told it to, possibly foolish thing to do, and I won\u2019t be doing it any more. The only problem is that while I remembered my password, and my computer remembered my password, AT&T didn\u2019t. It kept telling me to log in. I cursed a bit, and got by with a dialup connection for a day or so, but it wasn\u2019t much fun. When I first started doing Internet stuff including blogging \u2013 I can make a reasonable argument to having been the first blogger, although I didn\u2019t call it that because I thing the word blog is ugly \u2013 we were almost all on dialup unless we were on an academic or government campus that had backbone connections, and we were all careful to keep our web sites simple and easy to use because there weren\u2019t any high speed connections when we were on the road. Those were the days of hacking into a hotel\u2019s telephone system just to get dialup. But nowadays almost everyone has high bandwidth, and web sites often make a dozen link calls, and bring in fancy graphics, and some web sites are nearly impossible for people on dialup, and I decided to go get my Connect 900 activated. The AT&T store is only a couple of miles away from my Mission Beach condo.<\/p>\n Traffic was horrible. Mission Beach is a busy place and this was one of its busiest weekends, miles of tourists in cars, bicycles, tourist busses, golf carts, roller blades, and nearly every conceivable means of locomotion. It took half an hour to get the two miles to the AT&T store, where I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were five uniformed employees and no customers.<\/p>\n I hauled out the ThinkPad and explained my problem to one of the clerks. I showed him that the Connect 900 was working fine, and was in fact able to connect to AT&T, but AT&T didn\u2019t believe my password, and could he do something about that. Alas, he said, he didn\u2019t think so. He\u2019d never encountered that problem before. However, he\u2019d try. First thing was to get my ThinkPad on the store\u2019s wireless net. That turned out to be harder than it ought to be, because Windows 7 has a wireless management system, and the ThinkPad has a Lenovo wireless management system, and they hate each other, so you have to be familiar with both so you can keep one from interfering with the other, and my AT&T clerk cursed Windows because he was an Apple man. But eventually we go connected to the local Wifi net, and after a while we discovered what the problem was: AT&T remembered that I had an account, but I hadn\u2019t used it in 180 days (or perhaps longer) \u2013 so AT&T cancelled the account. Alas, though, my Connect 900 couldn\u2019t start a new account because it was still associated with the old one.<\/p>\n The clerk ingeniously solved the problem by removing the sim card from the Connect 900 and putting in a new one. I told you it was really a cellphone. With a new sim card AT&T saw it as a new phone, and asked me to tell it my name, address, phone number, email number, secret words, the name of my neighbor\u2019s cat, and so forth, created a new account, let me log in to it, and now was ready to charge my American Express card for prepayment of a block of time and gigabytes. There wasn\u2019t any charge for the new sim card.<\/p>\n After which everything worked just fine. The AT&T 3G system works quite well. It\u2019s not as fast as modern Wifi, but the slowness is lagging response time rather than throughput. And of course Wifi can get overloaded easily. All in all, having a working 3G connection system can be a useful backup for any road warrior. The only caution is that you will have to buy a day\u2019s time twice a year else AT&T will close you out and you\u2019ll have to go to an AT&T store to get a new sim card so you can fool AT&T into thinking you have bought a new Connect 900. It works with Apple and Linux systems as well as Windows. Recommended for road warriors who want to be sure of having a connection wherever you have 3G bars.<\/p>\n My beach house writing establishment: ThinkPad connected to an ancient but very good ViewSonic monitor, Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse, and other stuff. I do a lot of work down here, and Niven and I have done two novels here. When we started the monitor was older and the first computer I brought down here was a desktop with a 19\u201d bottle monitor.<\/p>\n There is a lot of good mail, and I had intended a big mailbag for tonight, but it\u2019s late, I am tired, and we will probably go home tomorrow, so it will have to wait. I\u2019ll get there. I\u2019ve got some of my energy back.<\/p>\n and we\u2019re home<\/p>\n View 737 Sunday, August 12, 2012 I spent part of the afternoon watching the Ryan and Romney show, and I was impressed. They play off each other very well. Clearly each respects the other, and they are in essential agreement. Regarding foreign policy: an old friend reminds me that most \u2026 Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"