so i’m safely in edinburgh. the rental car is returned. tania is off to london. i’m waiting on developments in the london housing front that i don’t want to go into too much detail about right now.

being back in edinburgh has made me realize that i really do love it here, and i’m happy to have a few days to kick back, sort through my thoughts and photos and plans, and spend as little money as possible.

so hopefully you’ll see a bit more of me here soon.

when we got to the hostel i was excited to find a sign advertising free wireless in the reception area, but i spent quite a while last night and this morning frustrated because i couldn’t get it to work.

it’s secured with a WEP key, and i kept getting a very unhelpful “nope, not working” kind of error when i typed it in. at first i thought it was a mac compatibility issue, but it was so silly, and i was so clearly picking up the network, so i just couldn’t shake the feeling that there was just something really stupid going on and i could conquer it with a simple trick if i just fiddled a bit and asserted myself as an hci professional.

sure enough, eventually i thought to look at the dropdown menu on the login screen, which defaulted to “WEP password.” i figured that it defaulted to that because it detected that one was needed, and i hadn’t thought to challenge that. i honestly hadn’t even consciously processed that there was a dropdown menu there. But there was, and it contained two other choices - “WEP hex (__ bit)” and “WEP ascii (__ bit)”. the gibberish that they gave me as a password was hex-ceptable, so i tried that choice instead, and it worked right away.

how stupid is that?! what use is that menu to the average user other than as a trial and error playground? why can’t it just take a second to look at what i input and guess what kind of key it is after that? or try more than one option when one hasn’t worked 75 times , rather than just telling me that there is some sort of unfathomable error?

sigh.

there’s work to do, my friends.

meanwhiles, i’m glad to have found a path out of the void, and i’ll be back in a bit.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 25th, 2006 at 8:18 am and is filed under things i do. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.