fwaggle.org

After a couple weeks of stuffing around with Telstra not liking the fact that I’ve got zero history with them (having lived in the US for 12 years until just recently), I finally managed to get a hold of a 4G hotspot through Bigpond. While I have several friends who loathe Telstra, they really were the only option for what I want to do – travel frequently up the guts of Australia and still have internet access as much as possible.

My experience with it thus far has actually been quite grand. The speeds are pretty excellent: I’ve pretty much never had faster than 6mbps ADSL, so of course the 12mbps down and 1.2mbps upstream I’ve averaged outside of the LTE service areas is going to seem awesome.

After taking almost an hour on the phone to activate the bastard, the device has pretty much functioned exactly the way it’s supposed to. I turn it on, open my laptop, and I have internet access (a few dead spots like central Australia notwithstanding). I plan on picking up an external antenna for it, and I may look at getting a Yagi (the ones that look like decorative coat racks as opposed to rods) as well if I can find or make an Android application that tracks Telstra towers and points at them for you.

I don’t think I’ve made any secret of the fact that the #1 thing I want to do with my professional life is MumbleDog, but it’s just not making the sort of money our growing family needs to accomplish the things we wanted to do. We came out to Australia to visit, but I always had the idea that I could pick up a part-time job to make a bit of extra cash (considering that minimum wage in Australia is so high, and the AUD to USD rate is so ridiculous) to pour back into MumbleDog to make it grow better.

Well I did that for a while, then my Dad ended up getting about ready to quit the job he had for health reasons. He was driving an escort vehicle for wide loads, and the owner of the van simply wanted him to put on more miles than he really wanted to do. An idea flashed through my mind, which I then ran by Sabriena… what if we did it instead?

It’s turned out pretty great – it’ll be a little while before I can get accredited so I can do the really big stuff, but we’ve been doing a couple of trips and it’s basically a way for us to get paid to see some of this awesome country.

It’s a pretty easy job too – basically a lot of talking on the CB and occasionally closing a bridge down (because unless the truck driver, sitting in front of several tons of momentum watches out for cars going over a bridge, he might just take someone’s roof off and then he’s in trouble), but mostly just driving for hours on end. We have to organize some sort of remote internet connection, because I can see that working from my phone is going to get extremely tiresome, but other than that it’s been pretty fantastic and I’m really enjoying it (and it doesn’t get in the way of MumbleDog to boot).