Wifi in BART
Wednesday, August 06, 2008 by Dave Winer.
I rode the BART into SF last night for a dinner near Moscone, first BART trip I've taken with the new Asus Eee PC 901 with XP. It's a fine little computer, so little in fact that you can almost think of it as a cell phone or an iPod, maybe a big iPhone, esp if you add on an EVDO modem, which I have. 
I had a 20 minute wait for the train returning to the East Bay at the Montgomery St station, so I whipped out the Asus, thinking I'd listen to some music or watch some video, but I noticed there was a wifi signal. Odd, since we were about 50 to 100 feet underground. Turns out it was an official BART wifi signal, a free trial, so I signed up, logged on, and downloaded the latest episode of Fresh Air and listened to it on the train home.
Now get this -- the wifi signal went about 1/2 the way across the tunnel under the bay! After the signal went away, with the lid closed the Asus makes a fine podcast player. All my podcatching software runs on it just fine. We may be getting somewhere interesting. (If only Apple had made a cell phone that ran Mac software, I know it's something like the Mac, but I'm lame and have no patience for platforms that are "something like" platforms my software already works on.)
Anyway BART's on board. Nice! (And yeah I know they're going to charge for it, and that's fine.)
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Dave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.
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