Well, not really. I’m actually sitting in the basement of a building right around Main and Taylor in downtown Columbia, on a floor whose [1] tenant runs an open WAP.

Much less romantic, I know, but I used to wardrive with friends back before it was the cool thing to do to come with your wireless-enabled laptop to a coffee house. Driving around downtown anywhere with an external USB card atop your car, wires everywhere, snaking down to your friend’s lap in the passenger seat where your laptop sat as you run NetStumbler to find something … ahh, now that’s fun. (Hi Sooz! )

I used to have this dream of coming to Columbia, a bigger city than Greenville, and having a great time. I bought a 1000W power inverter that I was going to install in my little old 1991 Lumina (given all the electrical problems these cars have I’m glad I haven’t … yet), and I was going to have all these friends that were going to pile into the car and we would all have our laptops running off of this inverter, wardriving or just sitting in a parking lot, IM’ing each other for the sheer fun of doing so.

That dream hasn’t come to pass. The most fellow-geek I know is sick of me (roommates do that I guess), and I don’t know but a handful of people in Columbia that I could ever just call up and talk with, let alone hang out with for an extended period of time. When I told my girlfriend about getting the power inverter, I was laughed and hooted practically out of the room. Everybody else just looks at me like you might at a dog with a broken leg. But hey, what do you know.

More to come, I started rambling and realized how off-topic I’d gotten. Here’s a [2] good website for finding hot spots, [3] here’s another, and here’s [4] what wardriving is all about.

(If nothing else, wardriving is a good excuse to get out of your apartment/house.)

Well, not really. I’m actually sitting in the basement of a building right around Main and Taylor in downtown Columbia, on a floor whose [5] tenant runs an open WAP.

Much less romantic, I know, but I used to wardrive with friends back before it was the cool thing to do to come with your wireless-enabled laptop to a coffee house. Driving around downtown anywhere with an external USB card atop your car, wires everywhere, snaking down to your friend’s lap in the passenger seat where your laptop sat as you run NetStumbler to find something … ahh, now that’s fun. (Hi Sooz! )

I used to have this dream of coming to Columbia, a bigger city than Greenville, and having a great time. I bought a 1000W power inverter that I was going to install in my little old 1991 Lumina (given all the electrical problems these cars have I’m glad I haven’t … yet), and I was going to have all these friends that were going to pile into the car and we would all have our laptops running off of this inverter, wardriving or just sitting in a parking lot, IM’ing each other for the sheer fun of doing so.

That dream hasn’t come to pass. The most fellow-geek I know is sick of me (roommates do that I guess), and I don’t know but a handful of people in Columbia that I could ever just call up and talk with, let alone hang out with for an extended period of time. When I told my girlfriend about getting the power inverter, I was laughed and hooted practically out of the room. Everybody else just looks at me like you might at a dog with a broken leg. But hey, what do you know.

More to come, I started rambling and realized how off-topic I’d gotten. Here’s a [6] good website for finding hot spots, [7] here’s another, and here’s [8] what wardriving is all about.

(If nothing else, wardriving is a good excuse to get out of your apartment/house.)