You may have noticed there have been very few posts here. There’s a reason for that. The first and foremost is that sending my rants in to the void has not been as personally cathartic as I’d hoped. My other goal for the blog, which actually has been somewhat successful, was to simply provide a vehicle for putting information out on the web that I thought might be useful for people, and that I couldn’t find elsewhere. Based on the traffic stats, those posts have actually been worthwhile, and my only reason for not doing more of this kind of post has been that I’ve been too busy playing with my son, finishing up my projects at MIT, and trying to get a job (in that order).

So, going forward, I’m just going to focus on the second category of posts (though I reserve the right to devolve to the first occasionally). This blog was getting too negative, anyway. In that spirit, here’s a particularly useful trick I just figured out while sitting in a coffee shop working remotely.

I recently gave up my nice window office since I was feeling guilty about taking up a nice spot but only working part time. So, I’ve been doing a lot of work remotely, usually from a coffee shop given that working at home just isn’t very productive when there’s an adorable toddler running around begging to be hugged. So, I splurged and decided to start paying the extra $20 a month to use my phone as an internet connection for my computer. This is becoming a pretty common thing, and Sprint even offers phones that will create a WiFi network on the fly (I use Bluetooth with my iPhone). I expect this will become even more common once the iPhone hits Verizon, as Apple will reportedly allow this version of their phone to create WiFi hotspots, too.

I would typically just leave my phone laying flat on the table next to my laptop. However, giving it a minute of thought, this is actually pretty dumb, for two reasons. First, having the phone so close to the laptop is probably not smart, as computers are notorious spewers of electromagnetic interference at pretty much every frequency imaginable. In theory, they should be shielded, but nothing is perfect and between the memory data rates and the processor clock speeds, a computer pretty much has the cell phone spectrum covered directly, if not with overtones. So, keep the cell phone away form the computer at least a foot or so.

Most importantly, however, leaving the cell phone flat on a table is a bad idea because it puts the antenna horizontal, whereas cell phone signals are polarized vertically. (What this means, if you’re not a fan of electromagnetics, is that the electrons in the cell phone tower antenna are being shaken up and down, not side-to-side. Radio waves are really just a way of keeping track of how electrons interact with each other. Without anything interfering, the electrons in your cell phone’s antenna will be wiggled in the same orientation and frequency as those in the cell tower antenna. However, antennas are designed for their electrons to be wiggled in a certain direction (it’s almost always along the long axis of the antenna) and a cell phone’s antenna is oriented with the assumption that the user is holding it upright against their ear.) Once I realized this, I put my phone up against a nearby wall so that it was standing straight up and down (as if somebody were holding it) and my data rates nearly doubled.

So, if you’re using your cell phone as an internet connection, keep it a bit away from the computer and prop it up so it’s vertical. Keeping it vertical in your pocket probably isn’t a great idea, since your body is pretty good at blocking radio. If you find this helps, please let me know in the comments. Right now my experience alone isn’t very statistically significant, to say the least.