Here at the station, waiting for a train and finding a minute to blog on SkypeZones. I got in with good signal strength so I may have time to catch up on blogging a bit.
In my peripathetic existence, wifi access becomes increasingly important to make use of (even enjoy) those dead hours in train stations and airports. It's good to see the promise of wifi beginning to bear fruit. And with SkypeZones the emphasis seems to have shifted a bit from association with coffee houses with coffee of dubious provenance. In fact, when I searched for MyCloud/SkypeZone hot spots in Plymouth, I got a list of most of the best pubs (and some pretty crummy ones) in town. Haven't tried the wifi pub crawl yet but it's something I must explore.
On the coffee thing - I had an interesting experience on a recent Saturday morning, when I returned from my first Estonian adventure. When in London I camp at my sister's place in Clapham. We sat up late over a bottle of wine on Friday night, talking about travel and culture and rubbish, as you do. Saturday morning I baled out to give her hangover some space, and headed out to Clapham High Street in search of wifi and coffee.
I found a nice space in Caffe Nero, ordered a large americano and signed up for an expensive day's wifi with Ready To Surf (£5 sterling for 24 hours access!!!). Things were cool for a while - caught up with email and a bit of research. Then I pushed the boat out a bit and donned headset to make some Skype calls to family in Ireland. Got some strange looks from some of the folk around me as I spoke to my computer but that adds to the fun.
However, the connection kept dropping and finally died 2 americanos later. After repeated requests to staff, the router was rebooted but no joy - wifi cloud is full of rain. No refunds to be had - the owner of the router, it seems, has no responsiblity for service provision - I won't be using that again. I was surrounded by serious people with lots of paperwork who had also paid for non-existent service. No joy for them either.
Last week I had to dash out in Plymouth to buy a webcam for a vido demo. I trawled techie and consumer shops for Skype certified webcams - nothing to be found. I lowered my sights until I finally found a box which had a Skype support badge. The webcam came packaged in a furry dog critter that wraps himself around the top of a laptop. "Right", says I, "what a cool thing to do in the wifi hotspot - sit with a blue tooth earpiece, speak to my dog and freak the weirdos.
Not to be. The doggy from Genius came with a piece of adware that my antivirus didn't like. So, instead of the pub crawl with the doggy, my computer went into enforced isolation until the IT doctors could assess damage. Opportunity lost but more to come.
