Cheery Vitriol

Last week was my first week at the new job. I’m finally working in the area, having purchased a condo on the Red Line for the convenience of taking the T to work. I was commuting to Mansfield, and while it was a productive commute, it was a 3-hour round trip.

Now however I’m working in Kendall Square. Four stops on the Red Line. Or, a 4.1 mile bike ride. Pretty cool.

My Comcast internet connection has sucked for quite a while. The signal is usually pretty fast, with regular significant dips in speed that usually come back after 30 seconds or so, sometimes as long as a couple of minutes. This is usually not a big deal, but once in a while there’s a significant noticeable lag.

For the past couple of weeks though, it’s been extremely slow (<30Kb!) in the mornings for some reason. It always comes back by around 9am, so by the time I'm at work it's ok. But Friday it pretty much died, with download speeds around 6-20Kb. Just like 1994 all over again. I called Comcast but they couldn't send someone out until Monday morning - ugh.

I'd purchased PdaNet for my Treo 650 for when I was travelling, and it worked pretty well. But that version doesn’t work on the 700, so I upgraded to the latest version. I figured that it would be faster than what I was seeing with the cable modem, and probably a lot faster since I have EV-DO. I was pleasantly surprised.

It’s quite fast - 300-500Kb or so - and I’ve been able to do regular internet stuff all weekend. This would have been a bad weekend to have no internet access since I’m working on a Google Maps mashup, and that would have been impossible to work on locally.

I live in Davis Square and work in Mansfield - we moved last January from the original office in Providence to the current location. I drove for several months, but it wasn’t that bad since I have flexible hours and could avoid a lot of traffic, and it’s a reverse commute so once I get out of the city it’s pretty quick. But it’s still a long commute and I’m unable to do much of anything other than listen to the radio.

There is a commuter rail station in Mansfield, but it’s about 1.25 miles from the office. I was already used to driving when we moved, and it’s 15 miles closer to home, so I just continued to drive. But it kept nagging at me that I live 1/4 mile from the Davis T stop and wasn’t using that convenience.

So I tried out the commute for a week and it was great - riding on the train, being able to read a book or just do nothing was pretty cool. I found a cheap mountain bike (to get between the train station and the office) on craigslist so I wouldn’t have to leave my good bike locked up at the train station overnight, and switched to taking the T.

Rainy days I’d walk instead of biking since I could use an umbrella, and since I have audio books and MP3 on my Treo, I was able to listen to them for an extra 20-25 minutes each way. Eventually I stopped riding the bike altogether and now walk from the train station to work and back, both for the exercise and for the listening time.

A few weeks ago I found a deal on a good Toshiba laptop, so I grabbed that. I have an HP desktop-replacement laptop that’s huge, heavy, and has terrible battery life, so although the new laptop isn’t quite the powerhouse that the HP is, it’s very portable and goes a long way between charges. So now I’m even able to write code during my commute.

Of course as I write this on the commuter rail, there’s a pinhead all the way at the other end of the train talking loudly enough into his cell phone that I can hear his entire conversation, so there are some disadvantages to this, but all in all I actually tend to look forward to my commute so I can get some coding, reading, or even sleeping done.