Reading Slashdot From Strange Locations 1006
aarrieta writes "I was thinking about the location of Slashdotters around the world. Many of us read /. from our houses/offices/schools. But I guess there are people reading Slashdot from non-traditional places/sites (an oil platform in the middle of the sea, Antarctica, the ISS, etc?) But what's the strangest place you've ever read Slashdot from, or the most remote place you're currently reading it from?"
I'm writing this from Antarctica (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The strangest place was.. (Score:2, Interesting)
During a meeting at Microsoft. (Score:2, Interesting)
Internet Kiosk (Score:2, Interesting)
IN INDIA (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The strangest place was.. (Score:1, Interesting)
Top of a 100' antennea (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Funny you should ask (Score:2, Interesting)
Deep Underground (Score:5, Interesting)
Scotland (Score:5, Interesting)
Highway: Home Server + DNS + SMS + Email Gateway (Score:5, Interesting)
"new SMS to 003436". "CMD S" for slashdot news command. 10 seconds later I get 2-4 SMS messages giving me the slashdot headlines. I've done this from a cottage, a highway coach, toilets in dingy bathrooms.
Svalbard (Score:4, Interesting)
Just for fun, I pulled up Slashdot on my Treo 600.
Surprisingly, both Telenor and Norway NetCom had very good GSM/GPRS coverage in and around Longyearbyen (the main city on Svalbard, pop. ~1500). I think this is probably the northernmost GSM service area in the world, at 78 degrees north.
-j
Ecuador (Score:1, Interesting)
Bush alaska (Score:2, Interesting)
The summit of Mauna Kea (Score:5, Interesting)
Places I'd Like To See (Score:2, Interesting)
- The Playboy Mansion
- The Oval Office
- Stonehenge
- Atlantis
And of course this place: http://community.webshots.com/album/70233469ukYjL
1100 feet from the man (Score:5, Interesting)
About halfway through I remembered that 802.11b was blanketing the area and wondered whether I had a signal. Although it was over a thousand feet from the camp areas, the conditions were perfect. So I checked e-mail and Slashdot; odd how a geek finds comfort when he's far from home.
Re:I'm writing this from Antarctica (Score:3, Interesting)
On an island in the Adriatic Sea (Score:2, Interesting)
Tourists: don't bother coming here, it's really, really awful here! Baaaaaaad!
On a tractor, in a field... (Score:2, Interesting)
of course, I checked it last week while sitting on the same tractor while waiting for a wagon of hay, too. It was hot, but the phone was still slow.
Russia, Nepal, Dutch Harbor (Score:4, Interesting)
Kathmandu, Nepal at an internet cafe. I wouldn't consider it terribly strange or remote though.
in Dutch Harbor, a southernmost island on the alaskan aleutian chain (unalaska) on a rather slow dial-up.
Don't know how I pulled it off... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was in the Bahamas and they didn't have any internet access... I could use my cell phone though I had to dial a special extension to reach into the USA... I rigged the IR port on my IIIc to use the IR port on my phone as a modem and dial out.... I checked my email, took a peek at Slashdot (or what I could see from it) and logged off...
2 weeks later, a bill for $78.00 for overseas calls and internet usage... It was worth it for the koolness factor
Underground in a coal mine (Score:5, Interesting)
Yellowstone NP, Mammoth Hot Springs (Score:2, Interesting)
I was getting Verizon 1xRTT signal in my cabin, of course I was going to get on the net with my laptop!
Lusty Lady Theater (Score:2, Interesting)
Um
Slash "Doting" it for my sister (Score:1, Interesting)
On the rugby field (Score:1, Interesting)
The "Stans" (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'm writing this from Antarctica (Score:5, Interesting)
Military Bases (Score:2, Interesting)
"Yes Sir,this is official business. I'm getting info on a new virus we might get hit with. Natlie Portman's hot grits? Er,that's the name of the virus. Yeah,that's the ticket."
remote village in india (Score:2, Interesting)
Next to a monkey (Score:2, Interesting)
Monkeys would hang out just a few feet away, outside the hut, watching me. Kind of wild.
(And here's a link [krugerpark.co.za] for the game lodge, which was a gorgeous place.)
On a 386 laptop... (Score:5, Interesting)
From the top a tower on top of mountain (Score:3, Interesting)
This comes from the middle of the Pacific Ocean (Score:2, Interesting)
Stravinsky Fountains, Paris (Score:5, Interesting)
I even met the guy who's point it is. He's on the third floor to the right of the police station. I asked him if it bothered him that I was on his wifi and he said, "Pas de tout" ("Not at all").
PS - Go easy on him, turn off images while browsing.
Weird? Um, maybe not... (Score:2, Interesting)
The weather was good and the sun was out. We stopped for a smoke in the slopes, and I figured why not try it out. Worked ok, except for the slooow GPRS though.
Re:I'm writing this from Antarctica (Score:1, Interesting)
Yee Olde Baghdad (Score:2, Interesting)
from a sealed-off undergroud bunker (Score:1, Interesting)
I read my Slashdot from a secure internet terminal in a sealed-off underground bunker. Fortunately, we're only sealed off for a month at a time every few months!
As you might guess, we also get satellite TV and radio, but its a lot safer to have chats on the internet that bother those cooped up in here. I think I owe what's left of my sanity to Slashdot!
Rwanda (Score:2, Interesting)
The OPerating room (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'm writing this from Antarctica (Score:3, Interesting)
I have (Score:5, Interesting)
Top that.
From Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I'm writing this from Antarctica (Score:2, Interesting)
McMurdo has 24x7 @ ~1Mb and has no spare BW.
Pole depends on which bird is visible and yes one of the birds is dying and has been for a while which is why it is being used by the NSF (they're cheap).
Also don't forget the LAG.
Two Places Stand Out (Score:3, Interesting)
1. In a stand while hunting deer - I purposely placed a deer stand where it could get a CDMA cell connection to surf on my Treo 300 and hunt at the same time. Pr0n and firearms, no place but Texas!
2. MDRS [marssociety.org], the only thing strange about there was that none of my other crewmates had ever heard of
Far north Japan, over a *really slow* dialup (Score:3, Interesting)
from my balcony during the great blackout... (Score:1, Interesting)
real strange... quiet, dead city at 3am...
From a non existing country (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I have (Score:2, Interesting)
2 years ago I worked at a remote mining site in northern BC on my ThinkPad. Used an orinoco wireless access point to access the LAN / WAN. That WAN spoke to the world over a VoIP link (a la Cisco) via Anik1 (Satellite) terminated in Vancouver. In the Vancouver office we had a nice little NAT / Firewall setup to points beyond.
I surfed slashdot from the tailings dam - not something I'd recommend, as the smell will get to you after a while. I voted in polls from the landing strip while waiting for supplies.
Although not incredibly robust (the signal was weak, and required line-of-sight for connectivity, etc.), it kept me up to date on stuff that mattered.
Endoscopy Suite (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, I am a physician.
Re:Deep Underground (Score:3, Interesting)
In a fire? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, we drag our line to where we need to be, mostly blind. We've got a thermal imager with us, so we can see what's going on, but most of the time is spent staring at... nothing, just smoke wafting in our faces, along with faint glow from the imager display.
After about 10 minutes of this I'm bored out of my skull, and I realized I'd stuffed my IPaq in my shirt pocket before putting on my gear. The ambient smoke only allowed you to see about 4 feet, but the temperature was tolerable... so I whipped it out, and... detected an open wifi, lmao. So, slashdot is hard enough to read on an IPaq, but throw in wearing full gear with an SCBA in a medium smoke condition, it was probably one of the stranger places I've read slashdot. Had fun, though, I managed to get AIM up and send off a few lines to the wife.
And no, trying to read it with a thermal imager doesn't work
Seismic Ship (Score:1, Interesting)
Under the Atlantic (Score:2, Interesting)
while i was out at sea, the wife once saw something on slashdot that she figured i would like. she included a snip of the article in a familygram (these are hand-written messages, mailed out to the submarine base). these messages are then transmitted out to the submarine fleet, where each sub grabs their respective messages, prints them, and passes the messages out to the crew.
so, i have (very indirectly) read slashdot from somewhere under the Atlantic.
replying... is a different issue entirely.
wait a second, 'transmitted out to the submarine fleet', hrm, it appears my wife /.'d most of the Navy. i'll have to congratulate her on that one.
Re:I'm writing this from Antarctica (Score:2, Interesting)
I believe I was told that McMurdo, at ~77S, could hit many of the equatorial and inclined orbit satellites, but South Pole Station had to wait for something to venture farther south of the equator to get a good shot. On the other hand, with no trees and GPS satellites all converging overhead on polar orbits, we had awesome GPS reception, routinely 9-10 satellites in range.
Finally, yes, I read /. there and through a 50km wireless link from a field camp at the base of the Dry Valleys. I'd bet someone has read it from the camp near the top of Mt. Erebus.
Re:I'm using 28k dial-up... now that's remote! (Score:4, Interesting)
The best part? Using jigdo to assemble Debian ISO's at about 750 characters per second over the same connection. Where we worked the bandwidth Nazis were 'making examples' out of some people for downloading large files, so I actually assembled the ISO's of all of the CD's for Debian Woody for the Alpha, and Debian Potato for the i386, mostly over slow connections. Needless to say, it slowed down my Slashdot browsing significantly.
BTW, when you have a slow connection that drops frequently, jigdo is a lifesaver. I would download for the 1.5 hour train ride each direction at 9,600 bps, then go home and resume downloading over my 26,400 bps dialup connection. Only when I was working late did I dare connect to download through the WAN, and then only for a few minutes a day.
Re:I'm writing this from Antarctica (Score:5, Interesting)
Black Island [bedouinboundaries.com]
The connection is a T1 that goes from town to Black Island via point-to-point microwave. Part of the T1 is used to carry voice telecom, fax lines, and MPEG-encoded television from the US.
Black Island was chosen because it can see (looking north) over the large bulk of Mt Erebus to make LOS with a geosync bird at the equator. See photo on the page, above. That's the dish in the dome, and you can see how high up the horizon Mt Erebus protrudes. McMurdo is at 77.88 degrees south, so a equatorial sat is still above the horizon.
Pole, at a full 90 degrees south cannot see a real equatorial geosync bird. But, birds that are decaying in orbit become highly variable in the N/S direction, so they appear to wobble up and down on the horizon. When it's up, it's usable. There are no mountains or ground clutter at Pole, so it only has to be up a little bit. Geosync birds do not move in the E/W direction, so the dish only has to track up and down. A previous poster who described the dish spinning around to track the horizon is sniffing skua dung.
I participated in a project [nasa.gov] to try to establish other lines of communication out of McMurdo via the NASA TDRS sats. I think I'm the sitting guy in this photo [nasa.gov].
Black Island is 'uninhabited', but people stay there for various periods of time to keep an eye on troublesome equipment. They brew a lot of beer there, during the down times.
I was present during the season of the construction of the current dome and dish on Black Island (though I was not at BI itself at the time). During a critical period of construction, part of the dome was finished, but it still had gaps in it. A massive storm (Herbie) came up, and shredded the whole dome with 120+Mph winds, spreading debris for miles. A new dome had to be flown in at the last minute, and landed in a heavy cargo plane on the rapidly-melting ice runway. But the new system has worked very well for the last 10 years, and McMurdo has excellent connectivity.
living in a 4wd (Score:1, Interesting)
I should also mention that I am not doing this because of any down turn in the economy or below standard wages, I enjoy it.
JC Penny? (Score:3, Interesting)
For extra geek points, I'rn able to do this by way of my HP iPaq 2215 PocketPC, which has a Bluetooth link with my Motorola V600 phone, which in turn has a GPRS Internet link with AT&T
(of course it took me 15 minutes to write this silly post with the damned hand writing recognition software!)
kentucky fried slashdot (Score:2, Interesting)
Strange place indeed (Score:2, Interesting)
Instead of doing usual things during down-time, like read, watch television/movies, etc, I sometimes go on the internet and do things like read
Re:I'm writing this from Antarctica (Score:4, Interesting)
Umm, Geostationary satellites are positioned over the equator and not reachable from the poles. Any other orbit would cross the equator and would not be in a poar region 100% of the time. What part of the orbits did he not know?
It made sense to me. A geostationary satellite over the North pole either would not be stationary and be on a polar orbit visiting both the north and south poles (Synchrnous polar orbit) or would simply fall down due to gravity since it wasn't orbiting at all.
Now if you could link to a swarm of satellites with orbits like the GPS system, then there is a chance of 24 hour coverage.
Persian Gulf (Score:2, Interesting)
Also read it from the airport in Amsterdam (Schipol?), the aeropuerto in Bogota, Internet cafes all over western Europe and in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. And once I borrowed my little cousin's Sidekick and read Slashdot whilst taking (leaving?) a crap in the woods.
hmmm...on second thought, that does beat out the boat in the gulf as the oddest place I've read Slashdot.
-Gandalf23@work
Off the coast of Africa (Score:4, Interesting)
Really nice to be looking out at a moonlit volcano while reading inane Slashdot comments
Re:I once read Slashdot from.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Zheleznogorsk, Russia (Score:1, Interesting)
Greetings from slashdotter heaven! (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm sitting in an internet cafe in the slums of Bangkok (stop laughing! It's accualy called Krung Thep). I am from canada (and they think i'm slow...eh?) but have been volunteering here for a month. They have more internet cafes per capita in the slums of thailand than on the main street of Toronto (read: the biggest city, in the most wired country). But they're all 56kbps, my ADSL will seem like T3 when I get back. I'll install my new Wi-Fi PCMCIA 2 card that I bought for aprx. $25 canadian as soon as I get home.
To all you slashdotters, Thailand is the PLACE for (cheap) technology. They have a place called IT MALL, where I bought my Wi-Fi card, that sells everything for horibly (which in my books means good) cheap. They also have a 5 story mall called Pan Tip plaza, all it sells is pirated DVDs, software, and electronics.
I AM WRITING FROM SLASHDOTTER HEAVEN