So I’m eating at the new Olga’s in Allen Park (Michigan) and I just went to plug my laptop into my cell phone to check my e-mail and the WiFi network “Olgas” popped up! And voila, free WiFi! And to think I thought I was afraid I going to get a crappy signal in the not-near-the-window spot where they put me.

FYI, it’s totally dead here and I got a great parking spot. Is there a football game or something on?!?

So I’m at Panera and there are all these college age students here with their laptops (I’m sure a few are older and a few are younger), more than I’ve ever seen here before. My guess is that a good portion of them are home from college for the weekend and their parent’s homes don’t have the high-speed internet access that they’ve gotten used to at college. So they’re here using the free WiFi. At least that’s my theory (and I’m sticking to it).

One thing I’ve noticed other times when at Panera is that the network always seems to work (start working) better if I launch Internet Explorer first, I’m not sure why, but whenever I’m at a hotspot and having problems that seems to get me going. I think it helps at other places but it really helps at Panera (it might be the user agreement they have you agree to before proceeding).
I noticed an extra network when I was trying to connect called “Kristy” and also noticed an iBook user who had all sorts of windows open (but none had web pages). We tried the above IE “trick” but I guess the new iBooks don’t ship with it. It was her first time trying to connect to a WiFi hotspot so there might be some other problem.
We never did get it going, I think it’s something in the “internet connect” options, she somehow created a 802.1x (point to point?) network and we couldn’t delete it. I had something similar happen once upon a time and it seems to me it was a bit of a problem until I was able to delete it, but I don’t know what I did to do that.