We're struggling with connectivity. When we arrived in AZ we suddenly started getting billed for data at a rate 3-4 times what we've had for the last nearly 2 years. We tried a different Verizon air card to no avail, so that was returned and we closed that particular Verizon line (one of 3). Sadly there's no way to tell anyone why we bailed out after 2 years of being happy customers. Sales apparently is tasked with blocking venomous vitriol from the unhappy masses.
We have unlimited data and messaging on our grandfathered-AllTel phones (recently upgraded to iPhones), but Verizon won't let us use the bandwidth as a personal hotspot to connect our laptops. Yes, it's physically possible to create the hotspot, but they block users from doing it themselves. Instead we have to change our plan which means we would lose our unlimited data/messaging which would be replaced with a 2 GB limit instead. Worse yet, we would lose our free roaming and free long distance on the phones.
So, after fighting it since early this year when we received our then new, hot-off-the-press iPad 2 tablets, we activated the 3G network for both of them. The cost is close to the same as the base rate of the air card data plan, there's no router required anymore since we operate separately, and bandwidth seems to accumulate accurately.
There are limitations using the iPad as the sole net access and maintaining this blog is only one. For instance I have to move photos from the laptop or camera onto the iPad. Can't use Picasa or Flickr as this would accumulate large bandwidth usage. And my first try using Google's Blogger to create a post from PHX airport exposed the complete inadequacy of that piece of Google software. What looks like a proper post in Blogger turns into a run-on sentence. And there's no means of controlling style beyond the template, e.g. no font controls like underscore, bold, etc. Looks like I need another editor, so...
This is my $3 experiment using BlogPress as an iPad app. BlogPress is a WordPress product my son suggested a year ago. At this point I've stumbled my way thru getting a post created, but so far I haven't discovered how to access previously published posts with BlogPress nor how to publish. And I don't know what a post looks like once it gets to the server. So the jury is still out.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Location:Tamarisk Ln, Benson, AZ
this post looks good! of course you may already know that. i'm behind on my reading.
ReplyDeleteI had to do some editing later. WordPress is better than using Safari and the Blogger editor, but it's not Nirvana. A work in progress that probably won't get better till we get on the road again!
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