About a year later, I was telling this story to my even geekier friend in the Palm Pilot Usergroup all about my war-walking experience. We laughed and he upgraded my software so I could see the network names. The next day I went for another war-walk and sure it connect but now I could see the name and it was "Lions Gate Hospital". The best part of this is that LGH was about 3 blocks east of where I was on Lonsdale and I was on the west side of the street. I looked up and saw the giant antennas on the tower at LGH and when I walked away from the bank, a Apartment building would block my view of the antenna and I was disconnected. So what I thought was the bank's weak open WIFI signal was really a impressive broadcasting antenna on top of the Lions Gate Hospital that I was able to connect to freely, almost 3 blocks away. And of course every time a bus passed me, it blocked my view of the antenna again.

A few months later I could no longer connect to LGH. I guess the IT department weighed giving their doctors mobile internet access in the entire hospital with all the free access they were giving to the surrounding Apartment buildings in a three block radius. Even funnier is I now work for the very same IT department in Vancouver Coastal Health as a programmer. Oh the irony.

Several years ago I had a Handera CE (fancy palm pilot for engineers with a CF Card slot) and installed an 802.11b access card in it that I bought for a huge amount of money from a dealer in Toronto. It was hard to get because it was still new tech and the supporting software that was on the Handera was buggy and probably still beta but it would allow me to connect to my network at home so I could check my email from the couch. FTW! What it wouldn't do though was let me search for new networks except to say "New Network Found" with no name. So I decided to go for a walk and down Lonsdale Ave in North Vancouver to see if anybody had a free and open connection. I didn't find anything except when I passed a bank. On Lonsdale there are about 3 or 4 big banks on the east side of the street and every time I walked by one I could get a free and open connection to a "New Network Found" but alas couldn't confirm who it was. So I assumed it was the bank. Seemed reasonable and almost too funny that the banks had all these open wifi networks. Even stranger was that every time a bus or big Semi truck drove by, the network would disconnect and I'd have to reconnect again. Even when I was right in front of the bank it still happened and I could figure it out? I thought maybe the busses and trucks were creating some new kind of Interference nobody had ever heard of. Well I wasnt worried, as I didnt think I needed to be able to have kids anyways.

I use to help out with the AV part of my church. We had a projector with an amazing slide show program that fazed in and out images, videos and you could superimpose the text on them. It was a real quality production and in addition to it was the MP3's that we created of the sermon. The whole thing was so accessible and really got me interested in being active in my church, 'cause it was kind of geeky rather than the usual hymn book singing I disliked immensely. The best part as that w did sing the hymns from the hymn book but because it was in powerpoint format, it felt more real.