Boyinks4Adventure

Today I ordered the equipment that I hope will provide us with reliable and fast-enough internet connectivity.  Since I know there are a large number of geeks following us I thought I’d post the details.

For the non-geek readers of this site, South by Southwest (SXSW) is a huge festival that takes place in Austin, TX every March.  The SXSW website has this description:

The South by Southwest® (SXSW®) Conferences & Festivals offer the unique convergence of original music, independent films, and emerging technologies. Fostering creative and professional growth alike, SXSW is the premier destination for discovery. http://www.sxsw.com

I’ve been to the Interactive portion of the festival the past three years, and have heard it more accurately described as “spring break for geeks”.  In addition to presentations by industry leaders, awards, and (lots of) after-hours parties, a significant aspect of the festival are the audience-proposed panels covering an incredible array of topics.

This year, one of the proposed topics is Technomadism - Living/Working Full-Time on the Road, and we’re pleased to be included as one of the prospective panelists.

What the internet can’t answer, good friends with the right data can. 

I had an onboard air setup on my Jeep—and it seemed like something similar for the truck would be even handier when we are traveling fulltime.  Should have pulled it off the Jeep before selling…but since I didn’t I just ordered one of these 12v units as they have been well-used by the off-road crowd.  They have some faults but the fixes are well-documented in discussion forum threads like this.

The truck has a nice open spot under the hood on the passenger side that I’m hoping the unit will fit into - I’ll hardmount it, and run an air line to the rear bumper for a connection point that’s mid-way between the truck and trailer.

Hopefully this setup will save us the hassle of trying to maneuver the truck and trailer around to check tire pressures at a gas station.

This trip is causing us to ask questions previously unasked - and the Internet is failing us at providing answers.

It seems so simple - all we want to know is for any given period of time, where in the USA are the temperatures around 70 degrees?  We’re trying to plan a route for our year on the road and just want to see what influence typical weather patterns would have on that planning.

I spent a couple hours last night fooling around on weather.com, experimenting Wolfram-Alpha, running Google searches and complaining on Twitter to no avail.  It seems the entire online weather world is only geared to answer questions in the form of “I plan to be in a specific location during a specific time, can you tell me what will the weather be?” and we need to flip that on it’s ear and ask “I plan to be in a specific weather pattern during a specific time, can you tell me where to find it?”

I didn’t think it would be so hard to do…I know the data is out there, but have to assume it’s a question so few people ask that the tools haven’t been constructed to answer it.