Last night a few of us from the class went out for a drink and a meal, while in the drinking phase of the evening I decided I might take the opportunity to sync up my e-mail via the wireless access point in the pub. While the transfer was happening a Darren Neimke IM'd me (is IM now a word? If not, I would like to submit it for consideration) to give me some feedback on my code review idea (which is going gang busters by the way).

At that point I reflected on how connected we are these days, when its possible to knock away some of the amber stuff and geek out at the same time.

Because of my earlier sync in the evening I decided not to get another twenty four hours of "broadband" Internet access when I got back to the hotel room since I was checking out the next day.

Actually I wanted to do some other things like transfer about 100MB of files to the company server via Offline Files, but given the recent performance of the hotel internet connection I doubted that it would be up for the challenge so the $20 wouldn't be worth it. It could wait until the morning when I went down to the cafe outside Cliftons early to grab a cappuccino.

Or so I thought. I got down to the cafe just before 8am sat down make an order and whipped out the laptop. For some strange reason I couldn't see the Azure wireless network. This happens quite a bit because I think the shop owners accidentally kick the cables out that support the wireless access points.

No problem thought I, because my wireless card had picked up six other unsecured networks in range. Being the nice guy that I am, I decided not to hijack someone elses network (there were some big names in that list). Instead I looked for the public access points. The strongest signal (four bars) was "Telstra CBD". I hadn't seen Telstra CBD before since the Telstra hotspots at the airport are all called "Telstra".

Unfortunately, while this network was not secured, it didn't seem to want to allocate me an IP address. I speculate that this is for one of two reasons, the first possibility is that it is in fact NOT a public access point, but rather an exposed internal Telstra network. The second possibility is that it was getting so much traffic that it had not addresses left to allocate.

So here I am, sitting in the training room, typing this blog entry with no means of getting it to the server. You'll just have to wait - until now.

(9 links - man I'm handing out the GoogleJuice today)