Thursday, January 8, 2009 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
< previous day | archives | next day >
Dawn at Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM, January 8, 2009
It's up!
I wake up in the middle of the night and my eye catches a reflected blinking green light on the ceiling. That's the indicator light on the USB720 modem - indicating data is moving. I have a connection!
The race is on... to get to the laptop, connect to a couple of banks and credit card accounts and get my online banking done before the the signal drops again...
Success! Phew! That takes the pressure off for a while.
By breakfast time the signal has disappeared again. Could a pattern be developing here where there is night time access for some reason? That would be better than nothing and might be enough to keep me from leaving the park in search of better access. I really don't feel like moving. We'll see.
Night camp
Site 7 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - very good signal and access speed ( I have to qualify this - during my January 2008 visit the signal and access speed was excellent - in January 2009 it was practically non-existent during the day and slow at night with unpredictable short periods of excellent access)
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park website
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park on my Nightcamps map
- Check the weather here
Beware of Hypnotic Media
To live sanely in Los Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be. They have planned a life for you — from the cradle to the grave and beyond — which it would be easy, fatally easy!, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up — before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don’t really want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach for the whiskey, that won’t help you. You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.