My best friend is on vacation this week. He and his family are staying in a place in Ocean Isle, NC [Google Map].

His wife took the kids to Myrtle Beach—an hour away—which is apparently the miniature golf capitol of the world; he says that the minature golf venues there look like they are all in competition with each other to be the biggest, baddest miniature golf places in the world… “like they’re built by MGM or something.”

Anyway, so I found this out on a surprise phone conversation I had with him a few moments ago. I saw a little Skype window pop up on my monitor telling me that he had just logged in, and I thought “That’s odd… he’s on vacation…” So, using my Skype software and my headset, I clicked a call button on-screen, and he clicked the answer button on his, and in a split second I could hear him tapping away on his keyboard.

I said “hello?”—which is something I picked up as a kid when starting a remote conversation. I could hear noises in the bacground. I said “Can you hear me? I can here you.” All of a sudden he says, “Oh, you can hear me?”

“Yeah, just fine.”

“Wow… I was fumbling around trying to get my headset… I guess this little pinhole microphone in my laptop is picking me up fine by itself!” He was listening to my voice coming from the laptop’s speakers.

So it turns out he has his laptop out at the beach with him, there in North Carolina, and managed to piggy-back off a wireless broadband connection by getting in close to some unwitting homeowner’s signal.

So there he is, about the same distance from the ocean as I am, only on opposite coasts of the US, and we’re having a phone conversation that is clearer than any regular phone or cell phone I have used.

And he’s the one looking stupid: he’s sitting at the beach talking out loud to a laptop, and laughing. People are probably walking by thinking “How did that homeless guy get a Titanium laptop?”