Wifi: Free or not ?

When the first public wifi network began to show up, it might have been late 2001 here in Czech Republic. Mainly hotels and the high-end cafés began to share their 128kbit/s line with their customers. But then someone though it's possible to make money out of it. And who's got the infrastructure ? And it wouldn't cost him virtually anything to make a hotspot ? Yes, landline and mobile providers. So former Eurotel and Telecom (merged and bought by O2 by now) decided to start a pilot service. Noone ever in czech republic has been taking money for hour or two of wireless connection. They offered their service to many hotes and pushed it into every single KFC restaurant. And it was free, until they've announced the service officially launched. You send them SMS, they bill you $3, that goes to your current phone bill. and you have the right to use it for hour. Or you can have 2 hours for $5. Or 24 hours for $15.

You can say "it's not really that expensive", but you could have a nice desert instead of 1 hour WiFi. It might been due to lack of propagation, people's lazyness to hassle with the payment or anything else.

The fact is that the service usage dropped after payments were required. T-Mobile did the same and I've never paid them a buck. I've been using the Eurotel's WifiJet (that was the name) with some free coupons, 4 times 5 hour coupon...I've drained them all and paid around 3 hours myself. But that's it. See ? It's free, people use it. It's not free and you think about it...do I really need the internet right now ?

All the cafés that got T-Mobile representative's head stuck in their ass telling them how the hotspot service is great are now ditching them, leaving open wifi for everyone. KFC decided they'll buy the all the network related equipment from O2 and run their own free WiFi in all the restaurants. Even on the Prague airport. Funny thing is that it's the first WiFi network there. Just because the airport didn't like any of those paid hotspot providers' terms.

The internet getting is free again, like it was meant to be when word "hotspot" was invented.

Do you think the "paid" and "free" seesaw will ever flip to free completely ? And flip back again then ? I know it's not possible to kill every paid hotspot provider, but if enough people choose to go to café with free WiFi over a paid one, they might just kill themselves...

MacBook Pros are here...

Duo. by OndraSoukup.

Just a quick one...they are here. I need to go play with mine a bit more. It works awesome, doesn't pickup my home wifi which is a great excuse to get AirPort Extreme now ;)

They keyboard is fabulous. LED screen shines so much I don't notice it's glossy.

Gotta run ;)

And you go see some unboxing pics ;)

I failed.

But at least I tried. I actually went to sleep after the last blogpost. I stayed up till 6:30 and woke up at 8:30...took a shower a it was just time to jet to work. But something has been wrong. My temporary office located in one of the meeting rooms got squatted by some Microsoft Axapta™ developers. That system never works. But that's not what I'm here for...my work was installing the damn computers. And this one was especially slow. Something wrong with the hard-drive. So basic installation of Windows XP took about two and half hours...and I couldn't nap because of the devs and some sales manager right next to me. 

I got home,  took a 23 minute nap at 6:15 PM...I was a bit tired, but after few minutes I was just fine. Then I tried to take a nap at 10:15 PM. Whoops. I woke up at 8:45 the next morning. And that's where I decided to screw this crazy sleeping scheme. Maybe in next few weeks I'll try again :) 

By the way, I scored myself a table in the IT office after cleaning it up...just a load of boxes and papers to stack somewhere else. The airconditioned office. Yes! Pretty nice as the temperatures raised from 16°C to 34°C during the day...and I get to be in the company of other IT guys. So now I know that Axapta sucks and those idiots in accounts screwed up the laptop order again.

The Poly-something sleep.

I know there's been something wrong with my sleep for long time. The time I've been going to sleep has been getting pushed back by the usual "I have to finish this" 5 or 10 minute stuff. And it's gone from 11PM to 2:30AM in last years. The bad thing about this ? I still had to get up for school, still the same time. 6:30AM. Which results in 4 hour sleep, right ? That caused me to develop a nasty habit of coming home, eating bits of food and falling asleep. You can't call that a nap cause I've sometimes napped longer than I actually slept at night. So all refreshed I woke up at 6 or 7 PM, ready to do stuff. I actually had 2 half-days and half-sleep during 24 hours. 4 hours sleep and then school and afternoon was 4-5 hour sleep and then doing something else during the night. 

It seemed like I had no other option than starting  to push the bed time back to midnight. But then my friend Adam Mulligan posted a message on twitter that confused me. Some strange words. Poly. That means something like ..."many" maybe. Phasic. Didn't realized what it was supposed to mean at the time. And Sleep. Adam will sleep. Hey, everyone does, no big deal. So let's try google, this makes no sense to me. Yet better, I'll ask wikipedia if it knows anything about the mysterious polyphasic sleep. 

Basically it's all about having some core sleep at night, I'll be making that those 4 hours of sleep I had till now, and some naps, 15 - 30 minutes, regularly,same time, every day. Your body will learn that you "need to" sleep like this and will fall into the deepest stage of sleep even when just napping for 15 minutes. I'll not go that deep to just nap and leave out the core sleep at night at all. But this can be also done after you learn how to nap the proper way. The average time to switch from regular monophasic sleep to polyphasic sleep is 14 days. During those, you may not feel well.

As my work is to install Windows machines manually, I'll start right tomorrow. The copy process and the initial unattended setup from Dell takes about 20 - 30 minutes, perfect for a nap. The only downside is that all offices have glass walls to the corridor, so everyone will see me sleeping in my overly comfortable chair...napping at work...I guess I'll just tape my blog URL onto the glass ;)

It is now 3:30 and I plan to wake up around 7:30 or 8 tomorrow. 10AM is when my work starts. Takes me about the same time to get there as it does to school. But I finally have time for morning RSS reading (cause newspaper is soooo pre-2000) and crunchy toasts! :-)