Spoiled.

My least exciting business trip of the year so far brings me to Des Moines. I'm at Camp Dodge this weekend for training, after which I'll be the Equal Opportunity representative for the 234th HHC. The plus side is uber-cheap lodging; the downside is that Camp Dodge is the middle of freakin' nowhere, Des Moines only slightly less so, and net access isn't exactly easy to come by. Right now I'm in a mall on the far west side of the city, curled up in an admittedly rather comfortable wing chair next to a garishly enormous fireplace. Yes, you read that right: a fireplace in a mall. One of the local homebuilders decided that the middle of a mall would be a good place to advertise their design services, and that the optimal method of doing so was to construct a floor-to-ceiling (bear in mind this is a two-story mall) freestanding fireplace, with what I'm fairly certain is a fake stone facade. Oh, and actual fire, though I haven't checked to see whether it's gas-fed, though I'd be really surprised if it were wood.

But it's comfortable. I'll give it that. They lose points for no electrical outlets, though.

It's funny how quickly I become acclimated to technological conveniences, and how much I miss them when they're not around. I've had 802.11b in my house for, oh, about a year and a half now; I could go back and find the exact day when I bought the router, because it was such a Neat New Thing that it merited its own LJ post. Now, cat5 is that annoying thing I trip over because semanticsmc's constantly-under-renovation desktop rig doesn't have a wireless card yet, and I find myself vaguely irritated when a free AP isn't available at a conference or hotel. Hell, I had better than dialup speeds in the Arctic thanks to the beneficence of NASA and the Canadian military.

Still, here I sit in an overstuffed upholstered chair which probably cost more than my bed, wondering when I'm going to get kicked out of this mall. I'm reluctant to launch into debugging the code I spent ten hours on last night because I've got a third of a battery left and eventually either the Cheesecake Factory nearby is going to close or security will swing by and show me the door, and reluctant to head back to the barracks because the cheap Winmodem that Dell packaged with this laptop doesn't work under Linux and I don't even have a dialup account in the area anyway, and what if I need to google on some obscure compiler error while I'm hacking?

I love nearly-ubiquitous access, but it's turned me into a spoiled brat. I hope truly ubiquitous access hurries up. Where art thou, o Bitchun Society?

Okay, enough whining. I've got a line on a coffeehouse that's open till midnight. Maybe they've got conveniently located outlets.