mmmm... wireless

Tuesday, December 02, 2003, at 12:46PM

By Eric Richardson

One of the things that spurred my to get a laptop, as I've mentioned before, was USC's installation of a wireless network on campus (big, but cool, coverage map). I love the idea of working anywhere on campus, free from the restraints of my apartment or a computer lab. Today I feel like I finally sort of got a piece of that. I've been on campus since 9:30am. In that time I've been online in Doheny Library, sitting in a hallway in a hallway in Annenberg, in an Annenberg classroom, back in Doheny (where this time I found a power outlet), and now outside, sitting by a fountain. That's really cool to me.

My laptop battery's been a champ, too. In general I can expect a good 3 hours out of it, a little more if I really crank down power usage. If I got a second battery, I think this thing could really last me all day without having to carry around a cord. I'm fascinated by watching my power usage. Right now ACPI says I'm using 1.1A, which isn't that bad. I can squeeze it to about 0.8A if I'm not using wireless and have the screen brightness down low.

Eric Richardson lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he works on payments infrastructure for Cash App.

Past lives involved streaming audio for Southern California Public Radio, running a hyperlocal news site for Downtown Los Angeles, working on custom mapping code, and writing Perl at the Jet Propulsion Labratory.

Previously on this date...

2005
Field Trip
So I had to take a field trip today for my Geology class. I wasn't excited about it, since it meant a good long while in a bus. We left USC at 8am...
2002
cell phones
I really know more than most people should about cell phones. Everyone else just cares about making and receiving calls, and here I am looking at things...
2001
more bar graphs
I've now completed evolving my bar graph code into a Perl module that works generically for any data. Witness two example outputs: test3 and test4.
2000
richardsons on the web
I was sitting around here today, waiting for a tape to record, just wandering around the web. On a whim, I decided to see who else in the world had a...