Category Archives: General Chaos

General Chaos

Comparative air travel

Here's a study in contrasts for you:

Flying out of BWI:
After negotiating hellish traffic, your wife and kids drop you at the curb nearest your ticket counter. Arriving one and a half hours before departure, you'll find a half-hour line at the TSA security checkpoint (and, if you weren't smart enough to pack everything into a carry-on, maybe twenty minutes at the ticket counter). You join the unwashed massses dashing for gates, and arrive in time to get on your plane–realizing, without recourse, that you left your cell phone charging in your office.

Flying out of Clinton County Airport in Plattsburgh–
You arrive an hour before departure time. Your family walks in with you–there's two-hour parking fifty feet from the terminal. You walk in, and hand your bags over to the TSA employee who won the draw. You realize you're missing your cell, and your wife drives back to the house and fetches it for you, while your daughter falls asleep on your lap in the waiting area. Finally, as the plane arrives–15 minutes before departure–you hand off your daughter to your wife and walk into the one and only boarding area and pass through the security checkpoint.

Hmmmm. Turboprop commuter planes are starting to look good.

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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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