Just had a birthday go by-none of your business which one-and decided to treat myself to something I'd long coveted: truly mobile Internet access, to wit, by tethering my cell phone to my Mac. I know what you're thinking-"What are you, the champion of free and open Wi-Fi, doing throwing yourself headfirst into the clutches of the most egregious form of play-for-pay?" Well, for one thing, I'm probably one of only two or three people still alive who actually does carry a cell phone only for emergencies, which is another way of saying I'm using prepaid at the cheapest pay-as-you-go rate. Those unused credits pile up eventually, and later this year I'd have run into my provider's account limit when I tried to add money to roll over my balance unless I began burning it off by spending some of it on something. And there just happens to be one place in particular that I frequent on occasion where something like bring-your-own Internet access comes in rather handy. More on that later.
Anyway, playing around with trying to read news on that hopelessly tiny screen and enter URLs using a telephone keypad has given me a new appreciation for ath64's observation in October's fifth-anniversary post that cellular-only access does indeed reduce its users to second-class netizens, so to speak. You've just got to have more going for you than that if you're going to do serious work. So...after a little tinkering and tweaking, I'm able to pull up your favorite search engine and mine on a 15 inch screen with a full-size keyboard attached, no matter where I happen to be.
Even if I happen to be in the Miller Nichols Library on the UMKC campus, where the wireless network is closed to outsiders. Now I can't really quibble with that-UMKC, after all, owes more to tuition-paying students than it does to anyone else. It simply would be nice, though, if-perhaps through the largesse of a carefully-solicited donor, maybe-they could see fit to open the Wi-Fi in this one location on campus up to everyone-as the Ethernet ports the wireless access replaced once were. Once again, I realize this isn't a public library we're talking about, but it's not like they're totally unwilling to serve the public.
Seven years is probably long enough to wait for nice, however, so I sauntered over to the neighborhood of 51st and Rockhill last night, laptop and phone in tow, not just to see how my new birthday present would perform where I bought it to use, but to take a gander at the place for the first time since its recent big makeover.
The long retractable power cords dangling from the ceiling are cool. Some of the power-challenged hotspots around town ought to consider them at the next remodel. Not so cool, however, is what they've done with the microfilm newspaper archive-a prime attraction for yours truly because of its more convenient location and hours of access. Before, you pulled the roll with the paper you wanted on it right out of the cabinet and carried it a few steps to a reader, then went to work. Now, you first pay a visit to the library's online catalog-which if you're not a student or a faculty or staff member means you either find a dedicated catalog computer or make use of bring-your-own access to get there-and request that the library's new robot retrieve the roll or rolls you need from closed stacks. Whether said robot actually does retrieve the requested material apparently depends on its mood. Bad enough when you're pursuing research for personal purposes when the local public libraries with newspaper morgues are closed. It would have been much worse had I been a student with a paper due in the morning. Good that there was still human intervention available-in the form of a helpful, competent staffer who got the materials in time for me to go through at least some of it.
Moral of the story: Just because something's newer and more sophisticated, it isn't necessarily better. After all, Rube Goldberg made a career of pointing that out. On second thought, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that no one currently enrolled at UMKC has ever heard of him. I must be getting old.
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