The RIGHT way to do library Wi-Fi...almost

Well, if ath64's adventures out West last year merited a couple of posts, I guess it's my turn. I'm afraid, however, that my journey's a bit less involved than ath64's hop over the continental divide. No, I'm up at the Des Moines Public Library on a historical research mission (yes, kids, there are still a few things you can't Google up) and thought I'd compliment the nice folks up here for not just a stunning new downtown facility-well, a couple of years old now, but I haven't been up here in nearly a couple of decades-but what I'd readily endorse, save for one quibble, as library wireless done right.

No nonsensical closing of the network to non-cardholders, no essentially worthless filtering (which, in the same manner as gun control only serves to keep guns out of law-abiding hands, only gets in the way of honest people trying to do legitimate work), just boot and scoot-that is, boot up your laptop and scoot off to wherever it is online you need to get to. The reading room I'm currently in is also host to maybe a hundred public-access workstations, and I don't see an idle one in the bunch. This is clearly a library administration made up of 21st-century thinkers who get what Wi-Fi in a library is for.

So why aren't there any power outlets back here by the microfilm machines? Come on, folks, a power strip or two plugged into the floor and conveniently left amidst these readers and printers would be a godsend. It's all you have left to do to turn your 9.9 into a perfect 10.

RUN!!! HIDE!!! OFF-TOPIC RANT ALERT!!!

Stopped in at my friendly neighborhood polling place-which also just happens to be the friendly neighborhood branch of our local public library-to do my civic duty and was struck by how it seems certain aspects of our lives are going in opposite directions, technology-wise. I mean, here I am posting to the World Wide Web from my own computer while connected wirelessly to the Internet in a branch library that also provides public-access computers for those who don't have one at home. The library's adoption of Wi-Fi served two beneficial purposes: First, it provides me with the convenience of Internet access wherever I happen to be in the building, without having to sign up and get in line for a public-access workstation and second, it frees up that workstation for someone else who really needs it. Win-win all around, right? I'd say so.

Contrast that situation, however, with the one that faced me within the past hour as I sat waiting-and waiting-and waiting-to cast my ballot on the ONE touch-screen voting machine available at this location. Sure, I could have opted for a slower and more fraud-susceptible paper ballot, but the real question ought to be why, EIGHT YEARS after the 2000 Florida debacle, there even ARE still such things as paper ballots? There should only be electronic voting machines by now. And there need to be enough of them at every polling place to speed things along.

Sheesh, if the library ran like this, the only thing you'd be able to access online here would still be the card catalog-and you'd still have to do it on a dumb green-screen terminal linked to a mainframe downtown.