Here's an article on the system which Sanjiva and company have been building.

In between meetings today (Wednesday), I hunkered down at Zeitgeist Coffee, which turned out to be centrally located for the various people I needed to see today (I picked it for the Wifi).

I don't really like coffee shops. There are a variety of reasons. First, I don't like coffee. I guess I don't have a sufficiently refined palate. You could pour me coffee from Folgers and coffee from Starbucks, and I'd be hard pressed to tell them apart. So the expensive gourmet factor doesn't appeal to me. When we first moved to Seattle, friends tried to addict me to coffee -- unsuccessfully. I have fairly severe lactose intolerance, which for a long time meant that I had to drink coffee black, also an uninviting prospect -- the availability of soy or rice milk has reduced this consideration quite a bit. So I use coffee for one reason: to stay awake when I need to. Today I added a second reason, to earn the right to use free wireless in a coffee shop.

The other problem with working in a coffee shop is that I am noise intolerant. I have pretty good hearing, which turns out to be a bad thing if you are sensitive to noise. Since many of my tasks require intense concentration, noise intolerance can be a problem. Today I saw with my iPod turned up fairly loudly in order to drown surrounding conversations and Zeitgeists own (and loud) music. Sounds antisocial -- but when I'm working, I'm generally antisocial.

So I was pleased to discover that I actually can do work in a coffee shop -- I participated in the Chandler IRC, I tracked down several bugs in some code that I am working on, and processed a bunch of e-mail. Just like I would have done at home. Didn't know I had it in me.

Also, today was the first day that I was actually able to use the Wifi network on the ferry. The WSF isn't quite ready to declare the system ready for use, but the Mobilisa folks let me register for an account, and have answered my tech support queries, so I figure I'm beta testing. So far I've used the network in the Seattle terminal, the Seattle terminal parking area (very important) and on the Tacoma and Wenatchee. Unfortunately the network didn't work in the Bainbridge Island parking area (very bad). And for some reason unknown to me and to SpeakEasy, my DSL provider, I can't access the servers at my house from the ferry network. The Mobilisa folks haven't figured that out either, yet, otherwise I would have posted from the ferry.