And then there was one...

Kansas City Public Library, Lucile H. Bluford Branch
3050 Prospect, Kansas City

802.11g
SSID: library

Looks like I'm going to lose the bet that the KCMO Library wouldn't make its self-imposed deadline to finish unwiring. I just came here from Sugar Creek, and it appears that all they have left to do there is hook up the backhaul (if they haven't already) and rename the access point. (After all my warnings to others not to do it, I just couldn't bring myself to boot up and see if the wide-open AP showing a default SSID was connected to anything; with my luck, the darn thing would have turned out to belong to someone else.)

And I'm not the only one glad that I lost. Upon arriving here at Bluford and discovering to my joy that it was finally lit up, I immediately began a frantic search for available power outlets, and found the most available one already spoken for by an iBook user. See, I told you they needed to do this place first!

As for that most available power outlet-a pair of them, actually-they're under a table with a magazine rack on it towards the back under the skylight and near the back windows. If you're the paranoid sort, there's a surge-protected outlet built into the table's upper left corner (you'll have to crawl underneath and plug the extension cord running from it into the wall outlet if you want to use it). There's another dual wall outlet to the right of the windows between a pair of paperback racks, but you'll have to be adventurous enough to move a chair over to it. I don't see any floor outlets anywhere, so charging up beforehand is definitely advisable. And I'm really not sure I'd want to try this location at midday with a high sun streaming down through that skylight unless I had enough battery power to sit somewhere darker for maybe an hour or two.

Which brings me to my next topic. Now that we've got (or soon will have) all the library locations unwired, let's get to work on making the outlying branches a bit more laptop-friendly. I think that for starters there ought to be at least one table at each of the neighborhood branches with enough power outlets to accomodate four users at a time. If saving floor space at some of these locations is a concern, someone might go take a look at the Information Commons in the Miller Nichols Library on the UMKC campus and see if the kind of furniture they employed is still available anywhere. Granted, they had the additional problem of providing hardwired network access along with power, but I think a table such as theirs in each branch, placed in an area where daytime lighting is conducive to LCD readability, would fill the bill nicely.