Some folks on the list have asked if I mind getting responses (the usual concern is one of conserving cellular modem bandwidth). Well, so far I have not been able to get the damn cellular modem to do much of anything for me -- even with the strong signals here in Rochester, NY it connects for a short while and then craps out. Forunately, it is not costing me much additional weight to haul this POS around with me: just a PCMCIA card (that stays in the handheld PC) and an twelve-inch cable to connect it to the cellphone. At any rate, on a landline I have plenty of BW to spare, so as long as there are no attachments (which this thing is not supposed to download anyway), I love getting responses, especially news from home.
Apparently a few folks were inadvertently left off of the list and are getting my reports second-hand from folks who were not. I apologize profusely to those who were overlooked. I can, with some difficulty, make additions to the mailing list from the road, but it is a bit of a pain. If you can line yourselves up somebody on the list to forward the diary to you, that would certainly be the easiest for me. Second easiest would be to contact Darren Leigh (dlleigh@frank.harvard.edu) and ask him to add you to the bike-diary alias on frank. If all else fails, I can log in from the handheld and do it myself.
It appears that these reports are going to be pretty sporadic since 1) cellular coverage of the back roads of America is worse than I expected and 2) the cellular modem is more demanding of signal quality than I expected and 3) the cellular modem is more demanding of power than I expeted. Ocassionally I pass a cellular tower on the road (they're easy to recognize), but without a source of AC power I can't really use the cellular modem since it drains the two AA cells powering the handheld almost instantly. I plan to continue making daily entries, and I will transmit them at the first opportunity, but that might be only once or twice a week.
Some recent additions to the list were wondering where in hell it is coming from. So here's the story: my brother-in-law loaned me his NEC MobilePro handheld PC, a MIPS R4000 powered WinCE clamshell computer with full keyboard (thanks, Ross) and I bought a 3Com 3CXM756 GSM & Cellular modem PCMCIA card that I can plug into both the handheld PC and the cellphone (a Nokia 6160m with AT&T Digital One-Rate service). In principle, that should be all that it takes; in practice it seems that it also takes an AC power source and a landline. Oh well, it was fun to try. Anyway, I am using these gizmos to send periodic (sporadic?) reports from the road as I ride my bicycle from Boston to Seattle to a list of folks who either expressed an interest or who I thought would be interested.
The plan of the moment is now to arrive in Buffalo on Friday and probably layover there Saturday. I'll shoot for Lockport tomorrow (Thursday) and have a leisurely day in Niagara Falls on Friday before continuing down to Buffalo. The next major cities on the route after Buffalo are Erie, PA and Cleveland, OH; the route follows a line about 15 miles south of Fort Wayne, IN at its closest approach. There are a couple of folks I would love to see in the Chicago area, but Adventure Cycling's route would take me well to the south of Chicago, and I'm not sure if it's wise to detour. I have at least until Cleveland to make up my mind, and good maps of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois if I decide to detour north.
Finally, if I'm not responding to your email quickly it's because my MO is to send my responses, download new mail, then disconnect. So you might not get a response to an email I just downloaded until the next connection. It doesn't mean that I'm ignoring you, just coping with my connectivity limitations.