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...

2004
Eastside gets funding
Nice to see this morning that the eastside Gold Line extension got its funding passed in Congress. I haven't looked at the design docs much, but here...
2002
getting down to writing
So I'm at the point where I finally have to sit down and write the paper I figured out a topic for about a month ago. I hate that transition to actually...