New Information for all the Kids to Soak Up, My Mac is Down and I'm in Tears

Tonight I decide to stroll downtown with the stinkpad and check out what the city has to offer in terms of wireless signals. There is a project called The Austin Wireless Project, seems as is SBC, ATT, whateva seems to be putting the knife in the project. Philadelphia has significant progress in this open air internet, free to the public anywhere in the city.

Well what does Austin have to offer? A / B / G protocols were scanned on South Congress, Downtown on 5th street, near St. David's, and from my humble abode on 38th. Most of these WalMart wireless routers you can buy for 40 bucks have a range from 500 to 1000 feet with the use of a high gain antenna.

Wireless network names ranged from conservative 'Our_Home' to 'nothingisfree' to uncool 'shibby' and to the most brokeback mountain-ish 'colon_compadres.'

Results -- SOCO ranged from 20 - 34 connections in a few different locations. Downtown has numbers ranging from the 20's to 50's. Around the state capital is where I found the most, around 60, most of them security locked, but plenty unsecured connections. St David's hospital area had 30 something, and bleeding into the walls of our place is a modest 9.

My router is 'Castaway', my web server is gillian, and the rest of the minnow crew is coming as money allots. The list goes on and on, 100% down to 20% in signal strength.

These numbers are only going to increase, it'll be interesting what the numbers will be like a year from now. I'm sure there is going to be a lot of wireless 'cyber-clutter.' The gov-ment may decide to subsidize this as a service the people one day, which gets my vote. How bout making money on the surfing trends in different areas of town, you know, so you can buy more 500 dollar office chairs or something like that?

For the record, IBM has far superior wireless connection tools than that of your standard Windows XP.