I’m at my group’s twice-yearly planning meeting, held at my boss’s summer cottage on Lake Wallenpaupack, in the Poconos. It’s a lovely area, but broadband is not available yet, so at every break, the dozen or so of us compete frantically for the two available phone lines so we can connect up to the network. And half the time, someone plugs into a line in use, blowing the session away.
This year, though, life is better. We’re still restricted to a phone line, but we’ve got a wireless LAN set up and are sharing a single dialup line seamlessly. It’s still slow, but it’s much better than any previous meeting. The real test will come tomorrow, when we should be paying attention to each other instead of our computers!
The other problem, of course, is that this is a summer resort area; facilities are a bit light during the winter (the hotel doesn’t serve breakfast during the winter, for example). And the roads in the development don’t get paved…and my winter driving skills are limited, to say the least. So far, so good, though — there’s no fresh snow arriving, and what’s on the ground is well packed.