Yeah, going to need mobile data.
I mean, to be fair, I haven’t really had a chance to map the business district yet, and business districts tend to be better about Wi-Fi coverage. But I mapped my neighbourhood this morning*, and found…nothing. Every other residence was locked. Every non-residence didn’t have a hotspot.
Still, I’m glad I did it. Now I know, and knowing where Wi-Fi isn’t is almost as important as knowing where it is. (I say “almost” because it’s more likely to lead to people trying to re-invent the wheel: anyone else looking at the public map won’t be able to distinguish “somebody mapped this area and found nothing” from “nobody has mapped this area yet”, although they might be able to guess if they see that the areas surrounding that area have clearly been mapped.)
I also learned more about hotspot default names. The stuff I looked up about it later wasn’t super clear, but reading between the lines, it looks like Cisco got sick of being “linksys” all the time, and more recent Linksys routers are named using a random generator that spits out things like “AquaCedar” and “BusyEagle”. (When I was in another town running errands, I saw a network named “FastDove”, and wondered why they chose that name. Now, I think that they didn’t choose it: it came that way.)
Almost all of the networks with this naming scheme (I saw one that didn’t have this; my guess is they opted out) have another network named “[name]-guest”. The guest network claims to be open, but when you try to load a webpage on it, it redirects to a password prompt.
(My stance on residences with password-locked hotspots is: passwords are, first and foremost, a “Keep Out” sign, and as a general rule I respect requests to “Keep Out” even if they’re unenforced. If you have a Wi-Fi password, I will make no attempt to figure out what it is, even if it would turn out to be “password”.
(If a non-residence (business, community centre, etc) happily gives out its password to anyone who walks in the door, I will happily give out its password too. Otherwise, I treat them like locked residences and don’t pry further. I even phrase my initial questioning as “Do you have Wi-Fi?” when I already know that they do, so that they have the easy out of answering “No, we don’t have it” when the real answer is “Yes, but you can’t have any.”))
Anyway, after three or four [adjective][animal/plant]-guests that weren’t actually open, I’m thinking I won’t even bother to try future instances of the category. Again, useful information.
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Oh, also, I did the factory reset I was planning on. Setting up my phone went much faster and smoother the second time (except Yahoo Calendar, but that’s Mom’s fault because it’s Mom’s calendar), and while I haven’t gotten all of my space back (I suspect the phone was lying when it said some of the built-in apps were removable; I think that’s enough to explain the remaining discrepancy), in general I am cautiously optimistic about the state of my hard drive. *knocks on wood*
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*When you’ve lived in Canada for over nine years, +1°C starts to feel like reasonable outdoor weather.
Tags:
#it’s supposed to be +8C on Saturday #the peak of the usual January thaw #looking forward to that #hoping to get a lot of mapping done this weekend #it’s about as enjoyable as I thought it would be #treasure-hunt/seeing-into-normally-hidden-layer-of-existence*/act-of-public-service rolled into one #(*chalk another one up on the ”humans as fae” tab) #oh look an original post #oh look an update #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now
Brinens and Things 
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