Monthly Archives: July 2003

buzzword compliance, General Chaos

Bizzare but tasty (not)

The product of the last three months of Lary Barrett's and my life is now revealed. Our article, “McBusted”, detailing McDonald's aborted IT efforts to track every burger sale in real-time, is in print and online.

There's a lot that isn't in the article that I wished could be…but as it is, as a friend said to me upon looking at it online, “Jeez, this thing is a novel.”

One of those moments that couldn't be fully captured in the article (it's touched on in one of the sidebars) was what happened when I tried to use McDonald's wireless internet access at the restaurant across from Grand Central.

The way McDonald's WiFi works would be pretty straightforward (that is, if it actually worked). You get a card with a scratch-off box covering your password, upon request, when you buy an Extra Value Meal. Then you fight a vagrant for a table in the 200-seat dining area, wipe the cold fries and spilt ketchup and soda from the table, and put your $2000 laptop on it next to your Extra Value Meal. (A note here–it's not necessarily a good idea to eat fries while using your computer, unless you like the feel of vegetable oil on your keyboard.)

Next, you scratch off the box on the card, exposing your password. Following the directions on your card, you start up your computer and attempt to access the wireless network; theoretically, a web site prompting you for a user name and password will come up, and you'll be given access to the Internet.

That isn't what happened in my case. I made extensive use of another feature of the scratch off card–the tech support number. Now, there's something truly Dadaist about sitting in a lunchtime-rush McDonald's dining room, under a “No Loitering” sign, with your laptop open and cell phone to your ear as you attempt to troubleshoot a free network connection for at least 45 minutes with some far-off tech support operator. There's something even more surreal about giving a call-back number to that operator when he escalates your trouble call to an engineer, as your fries cool, your paper cup full of Diet Coke and ice starts to sweat, and and the grease on your Quarter Pounder starts to congeal.

The WiFi access point on that day was not answering DHCP requests; I could see the network, and even the access point's physical Ethernet address, but my laptop wasn't being issued an IP address to connect with. The helpline operator at Cometa confirmed that there was something wrong with the access point.

Now, McDonald's is expanding the trial to over 70 restaurants in the San Francisco area. They wouldn't tell me how many people had even tried to connect in New York in the first three months of the trial; McDonald's PR said that not enough promotion had been done for the program yet to give out numbers.

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General Chaos

Have you ever been so consumed by a work project that it left you little time to do much more than work, sleep, and work some more?

I just completed work with a colleague, Larry Barrett, on an article about a certain fast food giant and their dance with information technology. The article, all 5000 words or so of it, plus charts and sidebar articles and other graphical treatments, will come out mid-month; I'll link to it from here if only as a way of accounting for the past two months of my life.

Yes, I did other things. I found time for recreation, of sorts. But when you're writing all day for work, sometimes there's nothing left in the hole for you to write for yourself.

Admittedly, I did not miss blogging all that much. I found other ways to waste five minutes between phone calls, like joining in a quick pick-up war online with Castle Wolfenstein Multiplayer . (Many, many Nazis died in the course of my work on the article.) And then, for father's day, my loving wife and children introduced Jedi Outcast into the mix (a game I'll review later in some form).

I did not have time to ride my bike, or smell the flowers, or do many other idyllic things with the spare time I didn't have. Some of this was because of work; some of it was because of a wave of respiratory ailments that swept through our house in late May and early June thanks to the Toddler Infectious Disease of the Week Club. A small fraction of it was because my mother-in-law came to Baltimore to visit a doctor, and what had originally been pitched as a week-long stay turned into a month. I love my mother-in-law, and she was a great houseguest, and is welcome back here any time. But adding one more person to the mix in our little Baltimore rowhouse for a month changed a lot of the dynamics of daily life.

The time off from blogging was well-timed, actually. It was accompanied by nearly a full-month national TV news blackout; I read the papers occasionally, but was much more in tune with the time it took cars to get through a drive thru than the current body count in Iraq. I was saved the temptation of getting online and repeatedly posting the intellectual equivalent of “I told you so”. I was focused on personal survival, so the rest of the world fell away for a while; it was, oddly, refreshing in some ways.

I'll be conserving my blogging energy for a while. Partly, it's because plugging back in is somewhat disorienting, and it will take a while to catch up on where things are in the world. I have not read anyone's blog since May. Now that I have surfaced like Punxsutawney Phil. I will scan the blogosphere again, before I unplug for the July 4th weekend.

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