I find that wireless networking is the way to go.

I’m not on the road right now. I’m in my bedroom, lounging on my bed with two big pillows behind my back. The air conditioning is on and the house is comfortably cool. My laptop is where it should be: on my lap. When I’m finished writing this, I’ll upload it to the Internet without moving more muscles than it takes to click a mouse button.

And look Mom! No wires!

I had cable modem installed in my house the other day. It isn’t a traditional cable modem. It’s a wireless one. We live beyond the cable boundaries and depend on Dish Network for television. But satellite Internet service isn’t Mac friendly and I won’t buy a PC just to have Internet in the house. So I went with wireless cable. They put an antenna on the roof of the house and it points at the big transmission tower about a mile west of here. A wire from our antenna comes into the house where it attaches to an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station. The base station acts as a DHCP router and shares its signal with an old Strawberry iMac (via old-fashioned Ethernet cable) and any computer within range that has a wireless card. That’s how I can lounge upstairs and surf the net at relatively fast speeds.

My home network isn’t the only wireless network my PowerBook connects to. When I’m up at the Grand Canyon, waiting for a flight at Papillon, I sometimes wake up the PowerBook to check my e-mail. As soon as I flip open the lid, it connects me to Papillon’s wireless network, which has been configured so I can access it. And two weeks ago, when I was in New Jersey for a funeral, I flipped the PowerBook open at Newark Liberty Airport and was surprised to find myself connected to the terminal’s wireless network. There are a few other networks I’ve managed to connect to, too, but there’s no need to go into details. Still, I find it amazing that wireless networks are so prevalent these days.

Makes you kind of wonder what’s traveling around us in wavelengths these days.

I’ve got all the equipment I need to set up a wireless network in my office. I just don’t have the time. I’m working on my Quicken book revision (again) and am too burned out at the end of a day to sit around and configure a network. But one of these days I’ll get around to it.

Hard to believe there are still people accessing the Internet via dial-up connection, isn’t it?