eric’s extremeboredom

This morning at 8am a group of people (I was unfortunetly not able to make it) from the SeattleWireless project met with the climbers we hired (thanks to last month’s fundraiser) to install an 802.11 antenna 150 ft. up a radio tower that is located on top of a large hill in the middle of seattle.

This afternoon Matt Westervelt blogged that the node is now live and ready for people to connect to! Lots more information and photos (including a panorama taken by one of the climbers) are avaliable on the wiki page for those of you who are interested. Everyone who has been frequenting HackNights lately hopes that the addition of this node will help bootstrap the network since so much of the city can see it.

I’d also like to metion that I am almost complete with the SeattleWireless Network Map, an interactive map of the network built using the Google Maps API.

If you are in the Seattle area and interested in joining the network, go find yourself on the map and add your location to our database. This way other people wil know that you are thinking about putting up a node, and can get in touch with you to discuss the possibility of setting up a link.

SeattleWireless also has a planet now, which is a great way to keep track of what people involved with the project are up to. If you are interested in wireless networking in general, add Trees Are The Enemy to your RSS reader.

This week CJ kicked off a project to build a community wireless network in Everett, a city outside of Seattle. If you happen to live over there, check it out.

So, contrary to what the New York Times might think, the dream of free networking is far from dead.

Finally, I’d like to congradulate Rob Flickenger and everyone else who worked on the new CreativeCommons licensed book: Wireless Networking in the Developing World, which is now avaliable for download. Unfortunetly it is not avaliable yet in paper form due to slight problems with llulu.