I took Kelly to her Irish Dance class tonight. It's in one of those 'warehouse business park' affairs (just North of Durham Road in Tigard), really just units that are big insulated garages. The teacher rents one out and holds her dance classes in the big open space. Really no spectator spaces for parents, so you either go run errrands or sit outside in your car. Since I don't like leaving Kelly without 'emergency transport', I sit outside.
This evening, I thought I'd be clever, and take my laptop, so I could watch the first half of the Appleseed movie (the class is one hour long). I suppose there's a miniscule risk of being mugged for my laptop, as this is a parking lot in a business park, but it seems fairly busy with parents coming and going, and isn't otherwise a pedestrian traffic zone, so I took the risk.
After dropping Kelly off with the teacher, I settled in, fired up my laptop, and noticed that the wireless icon was giving me 1 to 2 bars (about 25% to 50% signal strength). I checked the connection, and I was hooked up to a network named 'linksys'. Since this is the name of a company that makes wireless routers, I realized I was looking at a wireless access point that had never been taken beyond its default configuration.
One of the nice things about the iBook is that when its wireless card is turned on, it looks for open networks, and if it finds them, it just joins them. No fuss, no hunting. So I'm on the Internet! In addition to watching the first 45 minutes of the movie on my laptop, I also spent fifteen cruising Slashdot and all my usual browsing haunts.
I do love my technology!
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