Nerd Nomad

After posting yesterday about why I decided to live in an RV, I got a half dozen responses of, “What do you do about Internet?” I guess I’m not the only one addicted to the unlimited porn…er, I mean, knowledge, that the Internet provides.

RV Parks are Connected

The short answer is that RV parks almost universally provide WiFi these days. I’ve only stayed in two parks, so far, a KOA in Monterey, and Morro Dunes in Morro Bay. The former had spotty and somewhat slow Internet for $14.95/day, while Morro Dunes has excellent Internet that is included in the camping price of $41.50/night. I only stayed one day in Monterey, and will be staying here for a few days, because of this significant difference (among others; Monterey was also $73/night).

When I arrived in Morro Bay on Tuesday night, it was too late to check in, and thus I could park in the RV park, but couldn’t get Internet, so I just parked out by the beach until morning. I used my G1 tethered via PdaNet for Internet connectivity. 3G from T-Mobile doesn’t reach out here, so it was extremely slow, but it was sufficient for downloading my mail while I cooked dinner, just to respond to anything urgent.

3G is Pretty Fast

I plan to add a Nexus One with Verizon as soon as it’s available. Since I have a contract with T-Mobile for a few more months, I’ll have both for a little while, and will just get a data plan from Verizon. I’ve been told by several RVers that Verizon has the best coverage for fast Internet, and that seems to be the Internet’s opinion, as well. But, while I have both, I guess I’ll use whichever is the fastest in a given locale, when I do happen to be without WiFi provided by a park or nearby coffee shop.

I was spending about $70/month for Comcast Internet in Mountain View (on top of my ~$65/month T-Mobile account), so I have a bit of budget each month for solving the Internet problem. Sometimes it’ll be coffee shops, McDonald’s, Starbucks, etc., and sometimes it’ll be paying for WiFi at an RV park. And, of course, I’ll be spending a fixed amount each month for the availability of 3G on the phones, just in case I can’t get connected via a better method, but need to get some work done.

A Non-Issue, So Far

But, I guess the important take away is that, so far, I have never been completely without Internet, no matter where I’ve been. Parked on University in Palo Alto, I had 3G. Parked on the bay in Monterey at an RV park, I had WiFi provided by the park and non-3G phone service. Parked on the beach here in Morro Bay, I had non-3G phone connectivity, and now that I’m parked at an RV park, I have excellent WiFi connectivity, that has been reliable and fast even through the crazy wind and thunderstorms happening outside. I am still in California, of course, but these are farming and fishing towns, not technology towns. So, I think it’s a reasonably safe assumption that I’ll be able to connect somehow no matter where I am.

When I get to Mexico or those big stretches of nothing up north in Canada and Alaska, things might change, and I may have to re-assess my decision not to get satellite Internet. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. Satellite Internet is extremely expensive, starting at about $4000 just to get the equipment, and very high latency, making it uncomfortable for interactive ssh and the kinds of things I need to do. With my previous company, which built web caching proxy servers, I worked with several customers who were dealing with satellite Internet; folks on islands, ocean cruise ships, folks in Africa, and even just in the boonies in the US. Latency is an insoluble problem for satellite Internet. For web browsing it’s generally acceptable with aggressive caching and network stack tuning. I just don’t see it being a good option for the work I do, which requires heavy use of interactive ssh sessions.

Changing My Workflow

It is worth mentioning that my development workflow is changing dramatically in order to accommodate this lifestyle. I’ve used my company’s cloud computing management product, Cloudmin, to build disk images of all of my development and test environments on a server at our hosting provider, and I’ll spin them up and down as needed on the remote machine. So, while I used to build everything on my desktop machine, and then rsync to the deployment server, I will now build and deploy from machines in the same data center. I’ll work remotely (command line vim has always been my editor of choice, which works fine over ssh). In addition to removing the need for transmitting sometimes gigabytes of data, such as when we add a new OS to our repositories, this has the added pleasant benefit of allowing Jamie and Eric to be able to do things on the development systems, if for some reason I can’t.

I’ll try to post a video of that workflow and how I built the images in the next few days, though I’ll probably post it to my work blog, since it’s mostly a Cloudmin thing.