Sorry for the hiatus, folks. I had a busy weekend and a spasming shoulder to contend with, so I took a bit of a break for a few days. As to today, well, I spent about 95% of it stuck in the world's crappiest airplane en route to Chicago for Internet World. I'm gonna post a couple things tonight, and if Internet World provides Internet access, I may get some licks in tomorrow, too.
I'm just about fed up with tech conferences that don't provide Internet access. It just seems so fundamental. O'Reilly gets it: Tim and the boys saturate their conference facilities with wireless 802.11 Internet access, free for the plucking. But consider W3C meetings, which don't provide Web access (duh, duh, duh). And don't get me started on the venues for Digital Hollywood and the Peer to Peer Working Group: apparently these hotels are Tempest-shielded Faraday cages, since neither my cellphone nor my email pager will work there. Even the generally clueful PC Forum opted for some bizarre, proprietary 802.11 clone instead of the real stuff — needless to say, there was no MacOS or Unix support.
God, I'm having bad infrastructure karma. Last week, in the space of a few days, my RIM Pager, DSL router and cellphone died. So much for triple-redundancy. Ever hear the Lenny Bruce bit about the guy who gets too rank with the phone company and ends up like "a shmuck with two Dixie Cups and a string?" That was me. And just before I left for Chicago this morning, my sink in SF backed up and started filling the dishwasher with bracken. I sure hope my landlord gets back from holidays soon and checks his voxmail, otherwise, I may be facing a catastrophic aqueous event on my return. Discuss
