Ann Althouse, aghast, blogs that she’s blogging from a faculty meeting.
I’ll admit, there’s somthing incredibly fun about discovering that, rather than simply taking notes on your laptop, you suddenly have online access somewhere, and you can actually do something interesting while waiting for some boring blowhard to finally be done.
It also makes the time go by so much quicker while you’re waiting for, say, your tires to get patched.
What I don’t get is why some of these people don’t seem to have any idea what they have on their hands. In the case of the tire place, there was no doubt that the wireless access point was in their building, but they hadn’t done anything with it. It still had the network name it came with out of the box. Since I am a computer guy by trade, I try to let people know they have an open network on their hands when I discover one that looks like it was accidentally left wide open, but when I asked the employees if they intended to open up their workplace network for general wireless access, they gave me a blank look.
In that part of town, there are more than enough people with laptops, that saying “Hey, we can get you internet access while you wait to get your car serviced,” would be a big plus in convenience and service compared to the other service shops in the area, though it would be hard to make their reputation even better than it already is.
If they don’t intend to open up their wireless network but are instead using it for their business network, they need to lock it down, or hide it.
In the meantime, I check up on the news every time I’m there.