I’ll be honest with you right now, this weekend sucked.  Ok, so the whole thing didn’t suck but Sunday sure did. Emalee and I got up to go to church (always a good start to the day when we manage to wake up in time) and came home and had lunch. The wind here was crazy fierce, so much so that Emalee said at one point “Is this what a tornado is like”? That’s seriously not much of an exaggeration. The wind managed to knock over our trash cans and spread trash all over our large backyard which made for a nice afternoon activity. Then about 2pm everything went dead as the power finally gave out.

We get our electricity through a local coop that services much of the Southside Virginia area, so we usually expect if we’re experiencing any weather that doesn’t include sunbathing that the power could go out. So it really wasn’t any surprise that we lost power. But I would say the longest it’s been out has usually been about 5 hours or so. Until yesterday.

Around 6pm we decided since the power was still out that we would go into town to get dinner. It was there that the full extent of outages became apparent. The whole road leading to the main highway was blacked out (with the occasional dim light of candles in a few houses or a generator powering a single room). When we got into town our plans for dinner changed as we realized that half of Farmville was still without power including most of the upper business end. We ended up getting our dinner from a McDonalds drive through and taking it back home to eat by candlelight. By 8pm the house was starting t cool down and with the electricity still out we were in complete darkness save a few candles that were lit.

Me being the internet nerd of the family started getting twitches long before this time however as I went painful hours without connection to the web. Our laptops still had battery but of course without the satellite or router being powered we were S.O.L. That’s when I realized I still had the Latitude XT Dell Tablet I reviewed here a few days ago. One of the nice features of the laptop was the car charger and the built-in 3G Verizon Wireless modem (both optional purchases). I decided to fire up the card and activate the free trial to see if I could really get the internet with nothing more than a cell phone connection.

Keep in mind that I live out in the sticks. The presence of satellite internet should be your first clue that I have literally no other choices than that or dial-up where I live. But the broadband modem utility was register 2 out of 4 bars and activated smoothly. When I popped open Firefox I realized that not only was cellular broadband internet able to connect when we were completely powerless, it was also roughly 5 times faster than our satellite connection. I’ve heard people complain of the latency of cellular broadband but when you compare it to the >1000ms ping times I get on a regular basis with Hughesnet it’s actually a dream come true.  Part of what might have made my experience better than average locations was the likely lack of other users on that connection since most of this population probably doesn’t take advantage of this technology around here (yet). Another reason for the good speeds was probably the fact that the card was EVDO Rev. A as opposed to Rev. 0, an older and slower implementation of the technology.

It blew me away that in the midst of no heat, no electricity, no power of any sorts I could be working on a laptop powered occasionally by the car I drive everyday and also be connected to the internet with broadband speeds. Call it one of those shining moments for technology but it was truly an eye-opener for me. I’m already looking into replacing our satellite with cellular broadband and the Dell Tablet just got that much more useful in my eyes. So maybe the weekend didn’t completely suck after all.