Sorry, I'm going to have to ask for the gold star back.

Dropped in at the Plaza Library over the weekend, and it looks like reports of the death of filter overblocking on the KCMO Library's Wi-Fi were maybe a bit exaggerated. In addition, the signal strength was the worst I've ever seen there. My speed dropped to as low as 2 mbps. Not good when you're trying to download one of the digital audiobooks they now offer.

Remembrance

Not long ago I came across the box and sales receipt for the first piece of wireless networking hardware I ever bought. It's an 802.11b PCMCIA card that I still have but hardly ever use anymore, its having been supplanted by 802.11g and laptops with built-in wireless capability. Finding that receipt, however, led me into thinking back to the beginnings of my interest in all this-and contemplation of much more.

All that summer, I'd been gleaning everything I could from the Web about this strange new thing called Wi-Fi by some, intrigued by the possibility of accessing the Internet away from home without having to find a phone line-indeed, without resorting to wires at all. The prospect of going online in a library without having to sign up to use one of their computers-or leave a convenient seat near the bookshelves or microfilm machine to do so-was of particular interest. I couldn't help but wonder how long it would be before any of metropolitan Kansas City's public libraries would have this. Reading about what was happening on both coasts was fascinating; how soon would it be before there were local coffeehouses or other establishments offering free Internet without wires? And would a volunteer group arise here in the metro, as had one in New York City, for instance, to make a quixotic effort to unwire the entire community? One soon did, listing what it said were numerous locations open to anyone with a wirelessly enabled laptop.

Which explains why, when one of the big-box electronics retailers advertised that card one Sunday for a jaw-dropping $80, less a mail-in rebate as I recall, I went there straight after work the following afternoon. Right there in the parking lot after the purchase I pulled my two-month old laptop out of the trunk and fired it up to install the card and its drivers, so eager was I just to see if it would pick anything up. It didn't. Undaunted, I drove home with the laptop running on the seat beside me ("wardrivng" at that time had not yet earned its now well-deserved disrepute), but it didn't find anything then either. Once home, I went online to find and print out the listings of all the local sites where free Wi-Fi was said to be available, to take with me in the morning as a guide for a planned expedition after work.

I would leave work many hours early the next day, but I would not take that side trip-not then, and not for a very long time. Indeed, in the weeks and months afterward, I sometimes wondered if anything as trivial as wireless Internet would ever matter again. And to this very day I shudder at the memory of how the world changed so much in the course of only a couple of hours that next morning, every time I think of the date on that receipt.

You see, I bought that wireless card exactly five years ago yesterday, on September 10, 2001.