Mike Clark

Tonight I heard the sound, er wailing, of the internal modem on this Mac for the very first time. If it was a Windows box, before making that awful noise it would have first popped a dialog asking "Are you sure you want to do this, you pathetic excuse for a geek?". Of course, "OK" would have been the only option. But despite being born with WiFi as its mother tongue and, failing that, being able to speak guttural Ethernet, this Mac was respectful enough not to play the prima donna.

So, what do they think you're going to do in these hotel rooms: watch television, take an shower, and go to sleep? I'm sitting at a nice executive desk, next to a conference table with four chairs, and the television is hidden in one of those armoires, so it's not like they think I'm on vacation. If I wasn't working, this room sure would be trying to convince me that I should be. And if I pushed hard-copy paper around for a living, I'd have just dipped my feather quill pen in the ink well and signed the Louisiana Purchase Treaty. But I push packets around for a living, and I need to update a CVS repository that lives on some machine not inside this hotel.

Alas, I wasn't prepared with the list of dial-up phone numbers I carried around in the early 90s. So, without the comfort of packets in the air and without a fat pipe to stream ether through, well, it was time for desperate measures. Thankfully, I had cell phone reception and I frantically dialed somebody who was on the grid to find an access number. You can thank him for this blog.