Working on Pres Day & WiFi
So I’m doing errands downtown, on 2nd Street, and I’m trying to find some free wifi. The other day in the car (this is dumb I know) I had my powerbook on while I was driving and it was picking up maybe 50 different networks. - Pine & Battery or whereabouts. But sitting in Peets’ on Mission & 2nd, no wi-fi. Walk into the CNET lobby building, and no wifi. Walk to favorite cafe downtown, the “golden gate perk” (no where near GGP haha) and it’s closed. Walk through Chinatown to Russian Hill and the Chameleon, and there are all the zombies… like in that zombie movie where the town is vacant but the mall is full because, it’s explianed, “zombies do what they did in real life, regular habits, like shopping.” Chameleon is packed. I squeeze between two people and have a nice hi-speed wifi for work. Funny on this day-off, downtown was pretty vacant, but on Russian Hill the cafe was packed with worker bees like me. Extra points if you comment here with the proper zombie movie.
awesome pic as usual. I hope I get at least some of that when I hit town.
I like downtown when it is empty. kinda neat.
You need to check out FON (http://www.fon.com). There’s at least one FON node in Russian Hill (my place!).
Matt
That’s one of those chicken and egg things- you need wifi to check for the wifi spots…
>in the car (this is dumb I know) I had my powerbook on
> while I was driving and it was picking up maybe
> 50 different networks.
LOL! I’ve done that. Isn’t it called wardriving?
I was at the AAAS conference Th-today, held mainly at the Hilton but also at the Nikko and the Parc55.
Staff came into the session I was in at the Parc yesterday to ask that everyone who was hooked into the Parc WiFi to log off except for the speaker.
Seems some speakers were trying to use the WiFi connection to pull things up onto the screens for their talks but all the geeks in the various sessions had overloaded the WiFi system.
I want my MTV^H^H^HWiFi.
SO one of the reasons you don’t have your powerbook on while you’re driving is that frequently you have to do quick stops and scwhoop- the thing goes flying into the passenger seat footwell. Sad.
I once attended an ‘continued education learning unit’ class on CONTROLLING wifi, architecturally, within the confines of a prescribed range (ie: office zone. Some of it was common sense (build a concrete barrier!) while being at once non-sensical (can’t do that in the standard Class A leased floorplate!) but the most interesting/amusing moment was when the network security consultant gave a demo of unsecured wifi accessible while just crusing a loop around the FiDi. As the stream of available networks marched across the projection screen, an audible gasp came from the back of the room - ‘hey, that’s OUR network!..’
So hey, just keep cruising. They’re out there.
As an aside, since I’ve just jumped ship from pc to mac, I’ve found my OS X has a newly developed problem accessing my secured wifi in my apartment, so my off-the-self password protection, which is supposed to be hoarding all my good wifi just for me, is actually locking me out. Any mac gurus out there know of a patch to get my mac to make my password work??? gah!