Hmm, Moveable Type seems to be complaining about pound signs. “Application failed during request deserialization”, so it says…
Let’s try again, this time without the pound…
Archive for 12 December 2003
The thought of the two upcoming weeks in V90-land was getting me twitchy (hey, I’ve got work to do!) so purely out of a sense of “not a hope in hell” I googled for wifi and Whitehaven. To my utter amazement, there’s not one but two hotspots. Both in pubs, both operated by The Cloud – slightly dodgy name, so it remains to be seen if they actually exist, but maybe the 21st century isn’t passing the town by at all. At GBP6 an hour (plus beer) it’ll be an extravagance, but then you get the impression that the prices are aimed at the desperate.
An interesting piece on Mobitopia about the now-ubiquitousness of wifi. As the piece said, it’s one of those things that I’m starting to take for granted – it just works. I’m sat here at the dining table with a 54g card blazing away, which has completely liberated the place I choose to work. Two years ago I’d be hiding in the back room, because that’s where the ethernet is.
But I’ve not really been concious of wandering around in an electromagnetic soup until fairly recently – while I was setting up the wap for the incubator, there was half-a-dozen or so signals I picked up while I was wandering around the hallways with Netstumbler, but even though we were living in an apartment block in the centre of Leeds, there was never even so much as a sniff of any other signals. Now we’re in York, next door have obviously just bought an access point, because I was cursing the settings having picked up a strange IP address when I suddenly realised that it wasn’t my access point I was locking on to.
Presumably anyone sitting on the bench in the park outside would also be able to pick up both of our signals – part of me says quick, bolt it down, but then the other half says help yourself. It could come in useful next summer, assuming we’re still here – I quite fancy the idea of working out on the balcony once the weather gets warmer…
Another day spent tweaking (and that is the right word, pixel by bloody pixel) the new website layout for getcompany. While it’s a pain in the arse that we decided to junk the previous design after a fortnight of building it, the new look is worth the time invested in my opinion. Clean, simple, no frilly bits, and it downloads like the wind. All I need now is to figure out a way of getting the bloody tables to behave themselves, and I’ll be happy. Why IE should unilaterally decide to add 50% to a cell’s width when the coded width and the width of the image inside are exactly the same, god only knows. But it’s a right pain in the arse trying to get it to work.
I was halfway through pushing out an installation of VNC to a remote machine this evening when BT decided to turn off the Internet. From the symptoms, it looks like somone unplugged the Radius server at BT’s end, but the net result (’scuse the pun) was a distinct lack of DSL. And given my twitching, fidgeting, don’t-know-what-to-do-with-myself state of mind between then and it coming back on again a couple of minutes ago, the up and coming two weeks in the Lakes is going to be dial-up hell. How easy it is to get addicted to always-on…
