Author: todd

After spending an intense week at the Microsoft MVP Global Summit, being faced with a 12 noon hotel check out and a 5:20pm flight out of SeaTac, I decided to spend a bit of change to purchase a one-day pass that lets me hang out in an airline club lounge that provides a work desk, A/C outlets, and WiFi access (and snacks and soft drinks too).
The person at the lounge’s front desk handed me a WiFi brochure. My MacBook didn’t need any special instructions to connect. It simply told me that my preferred access point was not available and asked if I wanted to connect to one that was. After approving that action I was online.

Looking through the troubleshooting section of the brochure turned out to be interesting. It seems that Linksys 802.11G and Dell TrueMobile (1300 and 1400) WLAN Cards. I found it interesting that products that, I would guess, are in a large percentage of notebooks would be problem cases.

With all the discussions about WiFi safety, we sometimes forget that the other wireless protocol, Bluetooth, needs to be secured too.

I was trying to pair a new Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse with a MacBook over Bluetooth this evening in my hotel room. I was a bit surprised to see someone else’s Bluetooth enabled notebook show up in addition to my new mouse. I shouldn’t have been, of course, Bluetooth has a 10 meter range (or greater depending on the hardware used) and can penetrate walls. And, this person left his notebook’s Bluetooth radio in Discover mode. Since 10 meters is a bit larger than 30 feet and these hotel rooms are not larger than 30 feet long, I could see the notebook.
The moral to this story is to check your devices: Notebooks, PDAs, phones, etc. Then, make sure Discover mode is turned off except when you need to have the device probed by some other Bluetooth device for pairing.

What happens when you place a large number of techies (Microsoft MVPs in this case) in a large relatively modern hotel? Well, if the hotel (35 floors or so with 20 rooms per floor) only has two T1 lines (1.544Mbps per T1), you have saturated network access.

Fortunately, my SDA Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone has EDGE service. Unforunately, the SDA doesn’t have a QWERTY keyboard. But, my i-Mate K-JAM does. And, since both have Bluetooth, I used the SDA as a wireless modem and typed email messages from my Pocket PC.

The MVPs also seemed to saturate a number of cellular carriers’ cell sites around Seattle’s Convention Center during the day. So, that meant even my EDGE connection was lost for much of the day. Kind of strange to be in middle of a geekie techie fest and being without wired or wireless data access during the day and part of the night (just got back online to the hotel’s network minutes ago).