Andrew. Unplugged.

October 17, 2006

My trusty old router has gone pop, leaving me totally disconnected from the world. Let me explain…

I bought the Opera browser for my DS Lite yesterday, and couldn’t get it to connect with my wireless AP at home, despite configuring Opera correctly and despite my router being on the compatible list. I looked at Draytek’s website and the firmware I was running was one version out of date, so I thought that upgrading to the latest version probably wouldn’t hurt. HA! About 75% through the upgrade, the upgrade applet threw out the ominous words, “Timeout. No Response from router”. Uh-oh.

To cut a long story short, it is totally fubar. I can ping any IP address and get a response back. My router now thinks it is the entire Internet… “Mmwuuahahaha!”. Bloody thing.

Anyway, in order to be productive today, I packed up my laptop, my phone, my DS Lite, assorted power adapters and batteries and came in search of a wireless hotspot. Living in a small market town in central England, I thought this would be a mammoth task. As it turned out, the first place I tried did have a hotspot. Not only did it have one, it was free to use!

So, here I am working in a small-town coffee shop and getting strange looks from some of the people who come in. I feel like I should be writing an article for Web Worker Daily! I’m guessing that if this was Silicon Valley, I’d get strange looks for sitting in a coffee shop without a laptop.

Two things strike me about my situation today. First, how isolated I felt the moment I realised that I had no way of connecting to the outside world from home. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t have TV, so I use my net connection for news and entertainment, as well as for work and communication. Second, how comfortable it felt packing up my mobile office and setting up in a coffee shop. It makes a nice change to working in my office at home. Now I know it’s here, this could become a regular habit.

I’d be interested to know if you’ve had similar experiences - were you forced to find somewhere else to work; is it a public place, and do you enjoy working there? Do your work habits change when you’re working in a coffee shop, rather than an office? Let me know.

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