The ferry commute from San Francisco to Alameda I take is pretty awesome, already. It’s way better than any commute I’ve ever had, with sun, friendly people, big surfaces to set up my workspace on, and plenty of room for bikes.

Even better, I recently noticed that there was an open wireless AP called “bartender” on the ferry. With a connection, my commute is fully productive. The presence of “bartender” was intermittent, though. Sometimes it was there, sometimes not. At first, I thought it was just a certain vessel (there are two that serve this route), but it would vary even on that one.

So, I asked around and it turns out that the “bartender” network is actually run by one of the ferry’s actual bartenders. His name is Juan, and he’s studying to be a web developer, so he’s always got a laptop out at the bar. He wanted his own connection during his shifts, so he got himself one of those PCMCIA cards for a network connection over mobile wireless (Sprint, in this case.) And, because he’s generous, he got a wireless router to share it with the ship. I gave him a tip, yesterday, when I found out what the deal was.

Thanks, Juan! This is yet another example of why the ferry commute rocks.

Related Posts:

• Freedom (April, 2008)
• Congo line! (August, 2007)
• Making Progress! (September, 2007)
• Web2Open (April, 2008)
• Skydiving with Logan (October, 2008)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 6:58 pm and is filed under instructables, personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.