Extenuating Circumstances is a weblog by Dan Hon

Never work with conferences and wifi

As with most conferences, the wifi at Hack Day London was working when we arrived, and within about an hour, had inexplicably stopped working.

Predictably enough, hilarity ensued:

It’s working now. For the time being. Apparently Cisco engineers were despatched via a suborbship from the West Coast, rappelled down the ceiling and walls of Alexandra Palace and made the white boxes go from blinky red-orange-red to not-blinky green.

“oh hai i can has internets?” was you wasn’t it? Did you happen to bump into Andy Piper et al while you were there?

Yes, that loladhocwifinetwork was me.

I looked for Andy - rather, I heard that there were SL people there - but didn’t manage to find him amongst all the hacking… Next time!

For my part, I’m amazed how few people had heard of the fun! exciting! Windows wifi bug, where attempting to connect to a network with a name results in the machine publishing its own ad hoc network with the same name thereafter.

http://www.nmrc.org/pub/advise/20060114.txt

On the other hand, people better than me at hardware seemed to think it was a malicious G4 owner, so who knows?