if you want wifi in Starbucks in Beijing, You have to pay for it...
Rejoiced after 2 agonizing years of not having a laptop when i'm traveling, the company finally decided to let me have a laptop, this way, supposedly, I can do layouts right after photographer's session. Yikes...
Anyways, I got a 15" macbook pro , 2.16mhz, nothing extreme.
Today though, i decided i will do my work in a coffee shop, I will make this laptop worthy being in an art director's hands. Also I figured I can gather inspiration from people watching and internet at the same. So i packed my gear, went out of my cozy home into the city, thinking wifi hotspots are just overlapping eachother like saturday shopping crowd in XiDan. Again... my over optimistic attitude has cost me greatly. Sitting in a starbucks in a promanent part of Beijing, my mac book pro just wouldn't connect. With my sweaty palms, I used up all my network knowledge trying not to look like an idiot in there, and failed. Finally, I got up, walked up to the counter, asked an employee. "uh, excuse me, do I need to do anything to my laptop before connecting to your wifi here?" "No sir" Answered the employee, "It should be hassle free, no setup is required." So of course,
I thought its my fault, I somehow fucked it up. Then another girl picked up the conversation. "Just put in Your CNC" account name and password. Hmm, "C-N-C"... this name is so familiar... sounds like that stupid corporation I posted on my blog a while back... Now, knowing its once again the doings of CNC, I completely gave up all hopes of it ever connecting in Starbucks. I still asked faithfully "you mean,... just put account info like the one in my house internet?", "No, sir, you need a prepaid, wifi card".
Finally, I realized what went wrong, its not me, its not my machine, its the damn lousy CNC again. I can't believe I have to pay for wifi in a coffee shop, in fact I never believed it when Starbucks tried to do it in the states back in 1999, and that was when Wifi is still expensive. How can a telecom company charge people for wifi at Starbucks? Its like.. the two evil empires teamed up together to fuck over the consumers.
