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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   WiFi in the viewscape
Sunday, February 1 2009
At a little past noon, Gretchen and I joined two other vegan couples for brunch at the Garden Café in Woodstock. (Technically, I was the only non-vegan at our table.) Brunch is a new thing at the Garden Café, as are alcoholic beverages. The hope is that one of these will be the recipe for success in these troubled economic times.
Now I've never been a fan of breakfast and so view brunch with suspicion. I don't like the mixture of greasiness and disgusting sweetness that most people associate with breakfast. In particular, of course, I'm revolted by the pedestal upon which breakfast places all egg dishes. Eggs are disgusting, end of story. They smell bad, they're incredibly slimy, and they come from the assholes of small dinosaurs housed in concentration camps. You'd think I'd feel safe at a brunch being held at a vegan restaurant, but you don't know the depth of my pathology when it comes to my egg aversion. I've gotten to the point where I cannot eat anything that has been made to resemble an egg product. It's easy to make me refuse your vegan food; all you have to do is describe it using, say, the word "scramble." I hate that word. This was the reason I couldn't order the Garden Café's breakfast burrito, which I probably would have loved had it been marketed correctly. But no, it was made out to be a dirty diaper squeezed full of simulated eggy slime, a decadent dish for a weekend hangover. I was the only one at our table who ordered from the lunch menu; everyone else seemed to be having their minds blown by the novelty of breakfast foods at the region's only vegan restaurant. You know the kind of people I want to punch in the face? The kind of people who get jazzed by restaurants where it is possible to order breakfast at any time of the day. I'm sure someone out there wants to punch me in the face because I want to be able to order a slice of pizza at 8:00am. (But no restaurants cater to my bizarre needs.)

After brunch, Gretchen and I visited the residence of one of our new friends on West Saugerties Road. This friend had been complaining about the lack of broadband on her road, and I'd asked if she had a view. When she'd said she did, I'd suggested that she buy herself a 24 dB parabolic antenna and try to scam WiFi from whomever has an available hotspot in her viewscape. She'd taken my advice and bought an antenna on eBay, and today I was coming to see if it would work. Gretchen (and the dogs) were tagging along for the ride.
So there I was out on the deck with this woman and her husband trying to point the dish at various tiny dots (what houses looked like) on the landscape to the east. We didn't have a good way to secure the dish, so someone would kind of hold it freestyle, with its focus wandering gradually over the landscape while I hit refresh on the Linksys router's site survey web page. (The router had been reflashed with the Sveasoft firmware that allows it to act as bridge or a router.)
Eventually I found a hotspot called "linksys," which is always the best hotspot to find. It suggested a defaults-only router, one with no encyrption and the default administrator password. Such routers used to be common, but have become increasingly scarce. Unfortunately, we couldn't lock onto that hotspot long enough to see if it worked. In the process of trying, we found another called laptop_network.
It was a fairly warm day, with temperatures around 40, but eventually we got cold and called it a day. We spent a half hour or so talking in the living room, having one of those conversations about "what it all means" that stoners typically have, though only one of us had taken a drug, and that was me and it was black tea.
I left my router/bridge and antenna adapter cable for our friends to experiment with on their own. I suggested they try setting up the antenna in one of their White Pine trees, from which I was sure a commanding view could be had.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?090201

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