I returned home early the other day to discover I'd forgotten to pick up my house keys and that Fiona was out. So, sitting parked up outside our front door I took out my notebook and scoured around for an open WiFi access point, and duly found one. One of my less security concious neighbours leaves his connection open and connected to the web. What a nice chap, inadvertantly. Don't even know who he is, the access point was just called Linksys. Wardrivewaying.
WiFi
Wardriving With Doc
Picked up Doc Searls from his hotel in Regents Park last night en route to G&S in Soho (where I would later meet Stowe Boyd, Phil Wolf, and some other fine people I've previously met) and no sooner was he sitting in the passenger seat than he whipped out his not inconsiderably sized widescreen Powerbook and set about firing up his Macstumbler app to scan the route for WiFi hotspots. It was great to chat and share stories, Steven Wright jokes and various other stories from the tech frontline. Both my and Doc's social networks have been converging in one way or another for about 4 years, initially on outer fringes via the Cluetrain mailing list in 2000, then in low earth orbit via our blogrolls and posts and now in good old fashioned facetime - we first met face to face back in May but never got a good opportunity to chat with him properly. I never cease to be amazed and I delight at the way technology influences my life like this.
But I was totally impressed with James Cox's throw-away comment which totally popped my reality valve; with a perfectly serious facial expression and tone, James blurted out "and I can now synchronize my VoodooPad Wiki notes with my iPod." Roll back ten years, nay five even, and such pub talk would have been considered absolutely interplanetary in nature and origin. OK, maybe that sentence is still interplanetary to 99.9% of the population, but 0.1% of seven billion is still a big number. Awesome.
I also smirked when the discussion about RFID cited an example in Bulgaria (I think) where an RFID trial involved having an embedded chip in your upper arm, facilitating automatic payment for goods (presumably just by waving your arm about), but I did wonder how long it would be before people had RFID chips on their shoulders, and would people with RFID chips on their shoulders actually be resentful about the fact whilst simultaneously enjoying their new found consumer freedom?
But I was totally impressed with James Cox's throw-away comment which totally popped my reality valve; with a perfectly serious facial expression and tone, James blurted out "and I can now synchronize my VoodooPad Wiki notes with my iPod." Roll back ten years, nay five even, and such pub talk would have been considered absolutely interplanetary in nature and origin. OK, maybe that sentence is still interplanetary to 99.9% of the population, but 0.1% of seven billion is still a big number. Awesome.
I also smirked when the discussion about RFID cited an example in Bulgaria (I think) where an RFID trial involved having an embedded chip in your upper arm, facilitating automatic payment for goods (presumably just by waving your arm about), but I did wonder how long it would be before people had RFID chips on their shoulders, and would people with RFID chips on their shoulders actually be resentful about the fact whilst simultaneously enjoying their new found consumer freedom?
Wireless-lessness
in WiFi
I broke my home wireless network. I tried to connect my iPAQ to it earlier this evening and I think I confused something. So, I'm currently running on my built-in redundancy, fall back position, a Bluetooth connection courtesy of a USB dongle and a Bluetooth mobile phone's GPRS connection which kinda works OK.
Expensive, though, if you plan to blow your 30MB per month quota, after which point they repossess your home at gunpoint, or something unpleasant like that. Which, frankly, I'm pretty unlikely to risk happening tonight. Not at this speed. It's slow. Slow but operable. Unlike my WLAN. Which is slow and inoperable. Presently. I think I already said that. It's the ECHO setting. Setting.
Expensive, though, if you plan to blow your 30MB per month quota, after which point they repossess your home at gunpoint, or something unpleasant like that. Which, frankly, I'm pretty unlikely to risk happening tonight. Not at this speed. It's slow. Slow but operable. Unlike my WLAN. Which is slow and inoperable. Presently. I think I already said that. It's the ECHO setting. Setting.