one of life’s little incongruencies
This will combine two previous thoughts/ideas/posts I’ve put on my site over the last year or two…
I live in Seattle. Seattle is a fairly ‘wired’ town. WiFi coffee shops abound in pretty much every neighborhood, and many of the places that don’t advertise WiFi still have it, and if you’re lucky enough to know the staff well enough, they just might give you the password. And even if you don’t have the password to a local WiFi signal, if you’re within a block of a condo or apartment building, well then there’s always the chance that you might have a wireless signal that has been left unprotected, and you can then surf using somebody else’s signal. WiFi, DSL, cable modems, txt msgs, PDAs, cell phones, we got ‘em in Seattle.
So why is it so hard for my house to get a reliable signal? When I get home and turn on my computer, I don’t know if I’ll be able to surf the web in 5 minutes, or in an hour. OR, I may just not be able to that night, PERIOD! I don’t know what the problem is, other than a whole house full of people who don’t know the ins and outs of the digital world well enough to make it work right. Or maybe the landlord only knows how to set it up for PCs, cuz everybody who has ever lived in this house who has used an Apple computer has had problems. So in the midst of this fully wired and online city, I live in an oasis of modem incapacity. It’s frustrating as hell when I want to download system updates or big pictures from my sister in Egypt. And you can FORGET about streaming porn, folks. That just ain’t gonna happen.
So why then is it that I get up to Juneau for a long weekend, and no shit I find a wireless signal floating about the neighborhood? I was here in June of ’06 and May of this year, and every time I come here that signal gets more and more reliable as time as goes on. I’m 3 miles from a glacier, in the shadow of Thunder Mountain (that name is so metal!!!) and I’m surfing the web via WiFi!
Go figure.
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