Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Winchester University

I'm typing this from the student coffee lounge at Winchester University - opposite the prison and next to the hospital - there's food for thought!

As I write, Clare is attending her first OU AA100 tutorial in the main building somewhere, and I'm exploring remote Internet access. Meanwhile the rain is pouring down on the other side of the picture window, as it has been doing all day. We got soaked on our arrival after parking: we didn't know where any of the rooms were and wandered erratically for hundreds of yards between buildings in the downpour.

Returning damp and dripping to the coffee lounge, I initially tried to log onto an unsecured WiFi network here, but it asked for a user-id and password: my skills and inclination don't run to the couple of hours I have here trying to crack it. Instead I pulled out my Vodafone dongle and was rapidly connected to the local 3G network at around 280 kbps. For network traffic like this, it's indistinguishable from the 5 Mbps I'm getting in my home office.

Update: home now. Great relief I wasn't clamped for parking in the reserved staff area!