Didn't I say antihero?

I had the day off from work today, and mostly spent it worrying about when I'd have Internet access again. The Net went down as we were trying to upgrade our wireless network, in accordance with one of Munroe's Laws. I wasn't any help in fixing the problem, so I was told to sod off for a while and do something else. Unfortunately, I am so codependent on the Internet that when it goes away I am paralyzed until it comes back again. I can try to read or write but it doesn't really work. Knowing that I couldn't use the Internet if I wanted to, even if I don't want to, keeps me from focusing on anything else. As I write this the Internet is "up," but moving so slowly I'm pretty sure I can actually see the ones and zeroes, making just about any website that contains, say, a jpeg, unusable. As I write this it's down again. And as I write this, a couple of hours later, it's up and seems to be working okay, but we're still tinkering. Tinkering is dangerous.

I often wonder if there's some grand unifying principle behind all my little neuroses, about people and Internet outages and the future. Uncertainty has a lot to do with it. If I had a working Magic 8 Ball, one that actually told the future, I would abuse the hell out of it. I'd ask questions like "will things be all right if I go out to dinner?" and "if I stay in bed till two will I regret it later?" Eventually it would get so fed up with me it would just answer "better not tell you now" to every question. For the record, I didn't want to upgrade our network. Something like this always happens. I'm so frustration-averse that I would rather have a working network now and forever than a likely-better network after a few hours (or maybe days) of stewing. My frustration intolerance is the biggest threat to Lover's Lanes, and sadly that's all I have to say about the project tonight.

Two kinds of card

These came about a week ago, when I was in the middle of Alice's story. Five hundred of them plus a shiny business card holder for $7.99 plus shipping. Take out the gray interior border and this is exactly what the cards look like. Simple, pretty, informal rather than professional. I think they send the message I want to send, which is a friendly "this is a real thing and here's how to get in touch with me." If I ask someone for a story and they want to know whether I'm for real, I can say "sure, here's my card." Having a card means you're for real. I guess it's reasonable for someone who's been asked a personal question to want something tangible to guarantee that this isn't a scam and that if it is they know who to sue. Part of what I have to do is reassure people and encourage them to visit the blog, and this card accomplishes both those things. No cell phone number, though. I hate telephones, especially cells, and I'm going to be doing enough talking to strangers without also finding them on the other end of the phone line.

For the record, I got the cards from an Internet company called VistaPrint in what I think was a first-time special; if you need a bunch of business cards cheap I recommend them. (Just be willing to wade through a few pages of marketing -- no, I don't want the same image on a coffee mug or postcard -- before they let you actually place your order.)

I also visited Verizon today to find out if their nationwide-Internet deal is any better than AT&T's. Nope. The same bandwidth at the same price with the same minimum two-year commitment if you want the rebate on the same very expensive card. There might as well just be one company offering this service. It may just turn out to be necessary to pay full price for the card, because I'm not sure what percentage of budget inns offer wireless networking.

Unasked questions

Mission accomplished! It turns out the laptop-ready Internet card costs $60 a month with a minimum commitment of two years. Ouch! The question I forgot to ask, of course, is whether there's a way to get the card without the commitment, since I don't expect to be on the road for more than three months. I ran into this problem while apartment hunting, too: there is always a question you forget to ask, so ultimately you always act on incomplete information. The trick is finding some joy in this, which comes from listening to your gut and not making everything an optimization problem. Still, more bills...

Speaking of questions to ask, I want to do my first interview this weekend. Interviewing, however, is a difficult skill! My interviews are going to be what sociologists call "unstructured" in that I'm not going into them with a list of preset questions to ask, but that doesn't mean they don't require preparation. Even apart from needing courage to approach someone -- a private struggle that I'll blog about once I understand it better -- the best way to handle an interviewee is not obvious and probably varies widely. My goal is to get my subject to tell a love story in a way that puts me and my readers on the scene. The first obstacle, once I have a willing subject, is that they may not have a story in mind. I'm coming up with some "kindling" to help get the fire burning -- prompts like "Do you remember your first date?" or "How about a moment that made you very proud or very ashamed?"

Once they've settled on the story, the next obstacle is striking a fine balance between asking questions and listening. I need to be quick to intercept my subject if I need to ask a question about background, whether that's "who's Joanne?" or "wait, why were you swimming in a shark tank in the first place?", lest the tale become incomprehensible. I need to stay curious so that I don't forget to ask important questions (while accepting that to some extent it's inevitable, as I said above). On the other hand, I don't want to tread on the narrative. I can't interrupt them every few words; to some extent I have to trust them to tell their own stories. It's tough. Fortunately, many of the skills involved are a lot like the skills you use in having an everyday conversation -- which I want my interviews to resemble -- so none of this should be completely exotic. The hardest part in some ways may be communicating my sympathy, which is necessary if I expect my interviewee to be open with me, and doing it with subject after subject for however many thousands of miles the journey runs.

A challenge! But then, professional journalists do man-on-the-street interviews all the time and apparently get people to talk to them. I'll keep thinking about what approach to use, while remembering that the body of the interview is basically a special kind of conversation. I can handle conversations.

Chugging along

I didn't get much done over the weekend. I'm still standing at the divergence of two roads, or more accurately one road and one pair of rails. I did speak to one of Best Buy's computer people about the laptop, though! He said there's no real danger to my computer in connecting to whatever network is available wherever I happen to end up, so I don't have to invest in a security suite beyond the usual. He also brought my attention to what is called a LaptopConnect card, which in principle enables your computer to connect to the Internet from anywhere in the country using AT&T's wireless network. If I go by train this is probably indispensable, since I doubt Amtrak cars come with ISPs. Based on my research online, you ought to think of this card as a cell phone for your computer; as with a cell phone, the card is approximately free after the mail-in rebate, but then you have to buy a contract to make it work. There's sort of a multiplicity of contracts available, and the price scheme doesn't seem to be available over the Internet. I need to go to an AT&T store to find out whether this is affordable.

Tomorrow I'm going to call the Amtrak station in Orlando -- the closest full-service station to Fort Myers -- and ask them how far in advance you typically have to book in order to ride. If the answer is more than two or three days the train option is problematic. Amtrak's website seems to think that I could leave from Orlando tomorrow if I felt like it, and it says full bedrooms are sold out on that particular train, which suggests that if there were no space available in coach the website would know that and wouldn't let me book. I don't intend to travel the whole distance coach, of course; if one is going to travel for days at a time, at some point one would like a bed and some privacy. I may have to make do with coach for some stretches, though, because upgrades to a modest "Viewliner Roomette" cost more than the entire fare. A lot more. You can ride coach from Orlando to Seattle for $336, but if you want to avoid coach on all three of the trains involved, it's more like $1700. Not bad for what I'm planning -- if I made a beeline to Seattle by car, stopping only to eat and sleep in the nearest budget inn, I wouldn't get away with much less than that -- but entirely uneconomical for an average passenger. To be fair, though, there's a lot of difference between a seat in coach and a roomette, especially considering that the roomette comes with meals included plus various room amenities like A/C, an electrical outlet for the lappy, and an in-room sink and toilet. (You still have to use the communal showers; to avoid that you'd need a full bedroom, which runs an extra grand or so over the course of the trip.)

Of course, I won't be making a beeline for Seattle, no matter what mode of transportation I settle on. The trip will be made in shorter hops, hopefully with a few days spent at the cities that serve as my waypoints. If I go by train, I'll probably take coach on shorter trips and enjoy a roomette for longer ones.

The Chinese room

I first heard a couple years ago that the Chinese word for "crisis" was composed of two characters. The first, it was said, meant "danger;" the second meant "opportunity." This struck me as one of those claims that's fabricated out of whole cloth for a political speech or a mailing list thought of the day, so I Googled it. The skeptic in me was pleased to discover that I was partly right; while the first character of the word does mean danger, the second means a crucial point, which is not the same thing as an opportunity. Still, the saw was closer than I expected to the truth -- and whether or not it's true, it could be true. Many crises do contain seeds of opportunity, as much as I prefer to think of them as situations to be skirted whenever possible and torn through in the most expedient possible way otherwise.

Case in point: this morning my desktop computer got a virus. Actually it got the virus last night, but it wasn't until this morning that it quit working. Beyond my ability to fix; it wouldn't even let me reboot in safe mode. I handed it over to a technician this afternoon. He seems optimistic, but there's still a pretty good chance I've seen the last of my old compy.

So you have your danger. At the same time, though, it's an opportunity: I was going to need a laptop for Lover's Lanes anyway. This episode gives me the impetus to look into laptops sooner than I might otherwise have. I'm typing this post on a discarded laptop of my brother's to find out whether his oldish machine might nonetheless serve my purposes. (Two trojans in four hours so far, so early indications are not promising, but I've still learned something and will sleep well tonight.) Tomorrow maybe I'll go on Dell's website and see if there is such a thing as a high-security version of Vista for wi-fi compatible laptops. If, God forbid, my desktop doesn't come back to me all sparkly shiny and happy to see me, it'll just mean I'll have a laptop that much sooner.

I am philosophical to avert a nervous breakdown.

But it's still all true.

What will happen on the road if my computer gets a virus? I'm gonna be connecting to a lot of different networks. I'm going to need a first-class firewall, aren't I? I should find someone who knows more about technology than I do to talk with me about the challenges of cross-country travel with a laptop.