Unconnectivity
Maybe this whole wireless Internet thing isn’t ready for the real world, just yet. My own level of personal tolerance has been obvious; who else would wait two years to get connectivity. And i was willing to lay the blame where it belonged, at the door of those manufacturers that kept their cards close to their chests, only sharing proprietary information with the big guys in Redmond. More and more though, I think we have a generalized problem.
Earlier this week, we had a parachuted workshop, where the attendees all expected to connect their laptops to our network. Life isn’t simple, and it took almost an hour before we had everybody online. We changed access points. We disabled card drivers. We did the obvious things, but it still took longer than any rational explanation can cover.
Tonight, someone brought their personal laptop to a meeting. Again, connecting seemed to be an insurmountable problem. Yes, it involved Vista, and yes it involved WEP encryption. According to Google, I haven’t discovered anything new. The number of variables that could explain “seeing but not connecting” meant that scientific testing would take longer than the meeting, so I pulled a length of Cat-5 out of a box and “solved” the problem.
But it isn’t solved. There has to be a rational explanation. I brought IrishMoss (our little XO) along a couple of weeks ago for an afternoon at the office. No connectivity there either. Yet our machines in XP seem to have the magic. Maybe there’s something magical in our passphrase. Or maybe it has to do with the phases of the moon. Go figure. Maybe next week I can convince our resident wireless guru to show me a trick or two, because all that radio is makin’ me crazy.
