Afraid this one still needs a little work.

Town Pavilion
12th and Main, Kansas City

802.11g
SSID: TownPavilion

Well, where do I start? Oh, I don't know. How about the lousy signal strength? My built-in adapter isn't detecting a signal at all, and my USB finder/adapter is hanging onto it just barely enough to allow me to post this. Sitting in the third-floor food court, I'm poking along at a miserable 12 MBPS. Let's make that the north end of the food court; should you venture to the other end in search of one of the few power outlets in evidence, you'll probably lose the signal entirely, like I did.

And if anyone responsible for managing this network should happen across this, you really need to lose that unencrypted, nonfunctional login page. How is someone supposed to know they're just supposed to click through it without putting anything in (unless, of course, you're expecting them to be smart enough to know better than to enter sensitive data on a non-SSL protected page over an open wireless link, and thus deduce that the page has to be a dummy)? Better to just take them to your homepage to start with rather than confuse or alarm them unnecessarily.

One more thing: You and the landlord here really ought to get with your tenants and impress upon them the importance of securing their access points, lest someone who doesn't know an SSID from Shinola should happen along and hook up with them instead of you. Or perhaps I'm mistaken and all those open networks are really yours. If so, then here's a rule you and the nice folks out at the Johnson County Library should learn and live by: One network-one SSID. Makes life easier all around. Trust me.

Well, I'd better stop now. Just had to reconnect for the third time. I really hope these problems are just growing pains, and this location gets better with time.