A friend just called and asked me what my wireless network’s named. “Um, ‘boing’? Why?” It turns out he was at a coffee shop about a mile from my house and his laptop had picked up an AP named “BarrattNetwork”. He thought I’d just borged together a Mighty Antenna and might be Wisping or something. That’s amazing though – my name’s pretty rare in this country.
In more wifi news, I just set up a pretty neat rig. I needed a wireless->wired bridge that had a decent antenna. I looked around at the products that they sell as “gaming adaptors”, and they didn’t seem to be very controllable. I ended up picking up the Linksys WRT54GL and a nice directional high-gain antenna for $75 total, $25 less than one of those other ’lesser’ adaptors. One quick flash with OpenWRT later, and I’ve got 4 live network ports bridged over to any AP I care to point my antenna at. Very nice.
Update: It worked AWESOME when we installed it. Even from way inside the building the connection seemed rock solid, and we got great download speeds from it too.