by Dave Weigel
UNALASKA, AK -- So here's a question that no one has asked me.
"What's it like to blog from a remote location like historic Dutch Harbor/Unalaska, America's largest fishing port?"
Well, I'll tell you. It's rife with difficulties! In previous posts I've mentioned that everyone on this island gets Internet access from a satellite, and I have now learned that the mountain the satellite pickup rests on is called "Haystack." So it's slow. It's also hard to finesse. I'd like to work closer to the girlfriend I came out here to visit when I'm at her radio studio. But the connection is slow near her office and, relatively, fast in an adjacent room where a bunch of high schoolers are recording a radio show that, for reasons that elude me, makes frequent use of a dance remix of Air Supply's soft-rock classic "All Out of Love."
We are used to blogging quickly. That means more than posting; that means opening multiple windows to find links and insert YouTube videos into posts. That means catching e-mails and chats quickly and following up with them as you write. None of that's really possible here, and the result is, well, the sort of blogging we used to do in 2000 or so -- the blogging I read at AndrewSullivan.com when I was loading it on an ethernet connection at college. It's slow. It's full of lag time to re-think and over-think ideas.