I love Oona Räisänen's blog. She's my hero. She combines a love of figuring stuff out with lots of fun hacks. And when I read her blog it makes me happy to see someone with that joy of uncovering mysteries.
Also WiFi totally rocked on day -1, but if you want that I guess you could also go wired any other day (symmetric gigabit and the best abuse policy in the world yay!).
But of course you can also travel on the day it starts and miss a few talks, it's up to you and your family how much of an issue it is to miss 2nd Christmas day. I was home in plenty of time for new year though, you still have that ;)
Funnily enough, this isn't the first time Oona's RDS adventures have been on HN[1]. Indeed, there's a comment from a while back on here[2] from the time I was trying to convince her to submit to 44CON. The thing that really surprises a lot of people is that Oona does this sort of thing in her spare time.
This also fires up my drive to get more into Radio's and radio astronomy. It so fun to be able to grab all that stuff from the air that most people are unaware of. I got my first handheld a while ago, and people were like "WOW amaze" when There was a really clear night in Budapest, Hungary with the ISS 70deg. overhead, and I was picking up Russian com while pointing to the illuminated station. ( -- yes unlicensed (but I don't TX) ). And now planning to get a license because more bands for the win, and licensed radio operators actually get much love from government and rescue services.
There's also lots of stuff that you can do with a cheap DVB-T tuner and simple (DIY) aerial.
e.g., about those restaurant light-up/buzz pagers: http://www.windytan.com/2013/09/the-burger-pager.html