seems so wrong!

[Sundogg1911]

I'm setting on my porch at camp surfing the internet on my blackberry. It just seems wrong in so many ways!

[DanWalker]

I'm sitting in a shack, parked next to an oil rig, 30 miles from the nearest town, out in the middle of the High desert in Utah. I've also surfed the net via my laptop while parked ON lake sacagawea in North Dakota in the middle of winter, while watching my tipups, hoping to catch some walleye.

[Wayne Smith]

And I'm sitting in the middle of the suburburbs and don't get a signal on my cell phone inside the house and sometimes not even in the entire neighborhood!

[DanWalker]

I guess I'm lucky. I have a dedicated satellite internet connection.

[pumpguy]

I guess I am not patient enough to surf on my blackberry. I do have a Sprint card though. I hate to tell you how often I have used it to only check this website!!!!

[piwo]

The thing about the technology that got me was when I was in New Mexico Late December 2006. HUGE snows pounding the Jicarilla reservation: Cell phones didn't work, no radio stations, and here I am in the guys truck driving in literally 23 inches of snow, listening to Howard Stern on the guy's satellite radio. Something terribly wrong about that too!

[trk]

I'm setting on my porch at camp surfing the internet on my blackberry. It just seems wrong in so many ways!


You're right, THAT'S WRONG! Blackberry is our 'inside' cat. She knows that when I surf the net my lap is reserved for the keyboard!


(the golf-ball on the left was fired from a golf-ball caliber mortar with black powder)
http://www.hunt101.com/img/494616.JPG

[Bret4207]

Spending Memorial Day, the nicest we've had in years, sitting at a truck stop with no truck traffic coming from Canada. Did I mention it's Victoria Day in Canada? Oh well, at least I can keep up on what you guys are doing.

[BCB]

How much does all of this stuff cost? You guys that have all this high tech stuff must have some dang good jobs?...BCB

[BD]

I'm sitting at a jobsite today "supervising" some painters as we're pushing to complete this project on time. My little jobsite "office" has high speed cable. For less established jobsites we have a kyocera wireless router with a sprint card in it which creates a 54 MPS WI-FI site with about a 100 foot range. It's a little larger than a paper back book and can be plugged into the cigarette lighter of my truck or boat. I have no idea what this equipment or service costs as it's built into our overhead. I only see job related billable costs. Nice to have though!
BD

[trk]

How much does all of this stuff cost? You guys that have all this high tech stuff must have some dang good jobs?...BCB

MY Blackberry (the cat) came free when her purebread Persian momma ran away from our neighbors after they moved - came to us with kittens on board.

I'm on 56k (usually 44k) dialup.

[targetshootr]

In 1992 I was on a boat late one night in NC with a buddy who was talking to his girlfriend in her car in Tennesse. I thought it was just incredible.

[Buckshot]

................I have an answering machine hooked to the phone in the kitchen. I check messages oncertwice a week.

No cell phone (But I've seen'em)

No Blackberry (I don't know if I've seen one?)

No Bluetooth (I think this is what some of the drivers have. They walk around out in the lot looking like morons talking to themselves ?)

I can usually turn my computer on and successfully turn it off, so that next time it doesn't give me a nasty message that says it has to check the entire hard drive for errors or something.

When we moved out to the county in Jan 1980, we had no phone for almost 2 months. I admit it was kind of tough there at first, but we got acclimated to it. If it wasn't for the internet and this place, I've half a mind to give it another try.

.............Buckshot

[waksupi]

Buckshot, if those are the things hanging out of thier ears, yes, I agree they look like morons. It's pretty pitiful when someone can't seem to get to the store and back without being wired for sound.

[chevyiron420]

we had no phone for three years. it was nice not to worry about answering the dang thing. we finaly saved up enough for the phone and the broadband internet package. the phone stays turned off!! we just use the broadband part. i built this computor from scrap parts and a moniter from the goodwill store for 9 bucks. i do use a cell phone now and i mostly know that if it rings its someone i want to talk to. not a sales person.-phil:castmine:

[Obsolete]

hmmm... I dont have a microwave , Dont have an answering machine / voicemail , my teeth are white and not blue , I eat Blackberries , two of my three cars have carbs , one has mechanical lifters , a manual trans , point ignition ,I did brake down and get Cell Phones only because my wife threaten to divorce me if I didnt hehehe.... But I use the pay as you go option... much cheaper for our useage.....and I have no idea what a Blue Ray is.......

Yup I'm pretty much Obsolete in the New World Order.

[Lloyd Smale]

sorry pal but not at my camp! Only luxury there is the toliet and shower if you fire up the generator and take a cold shower. No computers allowed and my old lady gets pissed because i refuse to even take a cell phone out there. Attitude could come from 30 years of working for the power company. At camp i hate electricity!!

[chuebner]

Buckshot, if those are the things hanging out of their ears

And all this time I thought they were Borg that had been assimilated. :-D

Charlie

[grumpy one]

The computer thing is pretty easy for us. Five family members, five computers, all used every day, all connected to broadband internet. Eight-station home LAN originally cost a couple of hundred bucks plus some crawling around in the roofspace, which I didn't enjoy. Phone and fax are the problem areas, not computers - I'm hip deep in anti-spam stuff, and it works.

I get a few phone calls every day from people trying to peddle something. Up until 5 pm I pick up the phone and wait two seconds. If nobody's said anything I put it down again. If they have, unless they are a business partner or family member I say "Can't help you" and put it down within five seconds. After 5 pm I don't pick it up at all unless I get the coded ring family members use. Otherwise all goes to the answering machine. Faxes are pretty sparse but almost 100% spam. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to stop them - pushing the stop button doesn't seem to have any effect - so when they start I unplug the phone for half an hour. Seems to do the job. One thing I've found is that emailing the address given on the random faxes (contact us if you don't want us to send any more of this garbage) has no tendency to reduce the spam, and may increase it.

As far as I can tell I get all the phone calls because my wife likes to talk to these people, so we get on a lot of idiot lists which they then on-sell within the trade. My wife works full time whereas I'm retired, so I get to handle the results of it all. It isn't any big deal hanging up on people now that I've had the practice, but it still irritates me if they phone when I'm in the workshop or taking a nap.

So now I've hijacked the thread by making it into a personal rant.

[LarryM]

I know a guy that lives in a sheet metal shack with dirt floors, no running water and no phone and a satellite TV dish on his roof. The rural electric COOP will pretty much set a pole anywhere you ask.

[Johnch]

Well lets see
I eat wild Black Berries , No idea what I would use one for expect for a target

I have a dial up conection , they claim 56K , but much of the time I am lucky if I get 24K
I have a cell phone , it is in the truck , TURNED OFF
It is for my convenance
Not anyone else's
Also You will never catch me walking around with one of those things sticking out of my ear

Besides non of that junk holds up well to getting wet .
I do a lot of fishing in the summer, old jeans and shoes , I wade wet

I have a work cell phone , but unless I am on call 1 week out of 6 , it is turned off the second I leave work

Boss insisted I take my cell phone with me duck hunting , incase I was needed
The phone didn't make it , I steped in a rat hole and the phone got wet , Oh well [smilie=1: [smilie=1:

I have a answering machine and called ID
If I don't know the number , the machine gets it
If I think you warent a call back I will

No cable TV is avable , some neibors have satellite TV dish , but I am to cheap
I get 4 chanels on the TV , most of the time that is 4 to many

John

[DanWalker]

How much does all of this stuff cost? You guys that have all this high tech stuff must have some dang good jobs?...BCB
I dunno how much my company paid for the satellite dish, but I charge our customers 200 bucks a day just so I can have internet access.
Most of the living quarters out on these rigs.(we have our own) have satellite television as well.
My laptop with built in gps cost 1200 bucks and is worth every penny.
I use a handsfree headset on my cellphone because it's a pain in the butt trying to talk on the phone, navigate some of the roughest, most poorly marked roads in the western US, and keep my pickup out of the ditch, all at the same time.
My cellphone is also paid for, as is my truck and my fuel.
Yeah, I do have a good job now. My salary quadrupled when I became a field engineer. I guess this is just payback for all the years I spent in uniform, living on 250 bucks a week, Not to mention working as a biologist after college for 1800 a month.
The downside is that I'm away from home 20 days a month on average.
I have no set schedule. I work 7 days a week and 24 hours a day. 30 hours straight with no sleep is fairly common for me.

[pumpguy]

I am a lot like you, Dan. Laptop, Blackberry, fax, second phone line, and car are all company paid. The downside is that I am accessible nearly 24 hours a day. I am also gone nearly 3 weeks a month. I take advantage of all the goodies, but, I think with that much of my time being at someone elses disposal I have earned it. So, do I have a good job? Well, it is not the worst job I have ever had. I will do all I can now so I can relax more when I am older.

[longhorn]

Family of 4, we have 4 desktops, 4 laptops, 4 cellphones, 1 Blackberry (amazing technology!) The secret is that the human user must control the equipment, not the reverse.

[Sundogg1911]

BCB,
The Blackberry is a necessary evil that is provided to me for work. It's too expensive for me to pay for one myself. I also have an edge card to connect my laptop while there. I stopped taking the laptop to camp, because I'd end up working instead of camping. I also dropped the satellite dish because I really have been trying to get away from technology while there. I take the Blackberry because i'm paid to carry it and it's nice to check the weather, text my Daughter etc. :-D but i'm really trying to keep my microwave as about the most Hightech thing there. (next to the fishfinder) ;-) I have to admit that the edge card and blackberry have saved me an hour and a half drive to work to do about a half hours worth of work, so I guess I do like the thing for that. And I have been able to conference call once from the middle of the lake (don't tell my boss!) :drinks:

[Linstrum]

I’m certainly not going to condemn anyone who uses modern technology while out in the woods, if it makes things nicer for you, have at it! The Pursuit of Happiness is a most worthy quest!

When I go someplace I keep things as simple as possible. I usually sleep in the front seat of the car/pickup, whichever I take, and my connection to the outside world is the dashboard radio, which is obviously passive and one way! I try very hard not to get into a situation where I would need to own a cell phone by carrying extra fuel, oil, water, two spare tires, large tool kit, and a spare battery IF I go someplace where the walk back out would be inconvenient or my possessions left behind would be subject to theft (a place like that just may not exist anymore outside of Yukon or Alaska!). In the last twenty years I have given in a little bit on the luxuries, I now take a ruler, plenty of writing paper, a pocket calculator, and a dictionary with me since some of my better engineering and literary thoughts have occurred to me in wilderness places far, far away from the city lights, although finding a place that is legal to camp where everyone is not all crammed together like sardines into a “camping ghetto” complete with too-loud televisions and that damnable window-vibrating Rap Crap that for some unknown reason passes as music, is darned difficult. I almost forgot, I also have a GPS now because it makes knowing exactly where I have been very easy and it is important for me to know where I have been. My Dad lost the location of a rich gold deposit out in the desert near Mojave, California, and that wouldn’t have happened with a GPS unit.

Back starting in 1952 when my father took us on camping trips to the mountains of his native Utah, we learned to live quite comfortably without running water, cook stoves, toilets, beds, or even tents. That included the ladies. When it rained we put waterproof tarpaulins under and over our sleeping bags and enjoyed the patter of rain on us while we slept quite dry and warm. High wind was another matter, though, one time we dug trenches to sleep in to get out of a cold howling wind and if it had also been raining I guess we would have been pretty miserable! The bad wind only happened once.

From the age of 28 to 38 I lived on top of a mountain in a small shack I built on land I owned in a rural area of Ventura County, California. At the time I was working as a self-employed dozer operator and part-time chemist and machinist, so I had income and could have had luxuries if I wanted them. As far as household amenities I had water and nothing else. Two or three times I had snakes that managed to slip through a hole in the foundation get in bed with me. The snakes were a harmless nocturnal species called the rosy boa that are a grayish-pink color and when I told people that I had a big pink snake get in bed with me they just asked how much I had been drinking while slowly walking away from me sideways, all the time keeping one eye on me! See:

http://digital-desert.com/wildlife/desert-rosy-boa.html

I liked staying in the shack with my black Labrador dog because I had the great outdoors for my living room, but toward the end I was getting a little too miserable in the winter because I didn’t have any heat at all. I liked not having to wake up by an alarm clock, answer a phone or the door, but I began to become real concerned about rodent-borne diseases like sylvatic plague and another yet-to-be-diagnosed disease that was killing off campers and hunters in the Western States, including a university biologist doing research on deer mice just a few miles from me, so I became “civilized” again and moved back into a house. While I was back in civilization I got married, too. The disease that was killing off folks out in the boonies turned out to be Hantavirus and is still a concern when I go out where deer mice are, which is basically everywhere. In retrospect, those ten years without hot water, electricity, clock, stove, and having the Great Outdoors for my living room sure were fun!

[carpetman]

ok,I'll bite,what is a blackberry?

[Scrounger]

ok,I'll bite,what is a blackberry?

Blackberries

[Linstrum]

Hey, Scrounger, thanks for helping out with the mystery. I get it now, if you bite a blackberry, you get a Blue Tooth!

[USARO4]

No cell phone/ no blackberry/ no bluetooth/ no ipod/ nobody bothering me whenever they feel like it= peace of mind.

[Scrounger]

Hey, Scrounger, thanks for helping out with the mystery. I get it now, if you bite a blackberry, you get a Blue Tooth!

Or as CarpetMan says,"What's all this got to do with killing cats?"

[BD]

The company I work for provides me with the electronic gadgetry, my cell phone and a truck and fuel. While I have to answer the phone all day and check my email several times a day at work, when I'm off I can just leave that stuff behind, or not. It's up to me. They do not expect me to own another truck or cell phone for the weekends. I just have to buy the gas for personal trips and be responsible with the phone. It's the best outfit I've ever worked for, and I'm building the most interesting projects I've ever worked on.

BD

[qajaq59]

One thing I've found is that emailing the address given on the random faxes (contact us if you don't want us to send any more of this garbage) has no tendency to reduce the spam, and may increase it. Yup, that seems to be exactly what it does.

[gregg]

Never Never with out a gun and a Cell Phone. "DON"T LEAVE HOME WITH OUT IT."
I have a 81.5 year old mom and growen kids out there. I'm moble most the time.
Its the only way at that time to get ahold of me. Mom heath not that good. I have been the only contact for sick and dieing family for the last 8 years till I cannot think of not haveing a cell phone always with me. I might even try to go hunting this fall. First time in 7 years. If you can shut out the world and have no family to worry about or worries about you being by yourself I don't know if your lucky or not? :-(