My wife and I had to take one of my daughters (Jenna) to London for a special test today at the Children’s Hospital. She’s undergoing a hearing threshold test to determine the degree of hearing loss she has. That isn’t the point of this post however (but do keep her in prayer!). I’m writing this from our hotel room and that’s the reason for this post.
I’m simply amazed with the capabilities of wireless networking! Back in January of this year our church upgraded our computers and we added a network and of course I had the fun job of installing everything :). Since the cost of wireless had come down so much I decided to go ahead and save work (threading wires through tight spaces is no fun) by putting in a wireless router and buying some cheap D-Link USB Adapters to plug in the computers. I learned alot in the process, not only about networking but also specifically wireless networking.
One of the tools I discovered that has proven to be a great help is Network Magic by Pure Networks. While I feel I have a pretty good handle on how networking works (sharing files, printers etc.) without using Network Magic I still decided to purchase it for the church anyway because it makes things dramatically quicker and easier to use and is a big time saver. If you are new to networks NM will help you get up and running in no time. If you are a network guru its features and time-savers are worth the price too!
Anyway I’m diverging from the purpose of my post (although it’s not too far off topic 😆 ). Before leaving for this trip to London I remembered reading an article somewhere about how most hotel chains have installed wireless networking in their facilities so that guests can have free wireless internet connection when staying in their rooms. So I thought, what the heck, I’ll grab the churches laptop and the D-Link USB adapter and give it a go when I get to the Day’s Inn in London. What do you know – 20 minutes after arriving I’m on the net! How cool is that. What’s more, I also use a program called Logmein which allows you to connect to your computer over the internet and control it as if you were sitting right in front of it. I have it installed on my desktop at the church as well as my computer at home. Well I decided to connect to my computer at home and see if I could get my mom’s attention who is watching our other three kids while we’re away. I connected, opened up notepad and then loaded up winamp, set the volume at max and played a song. I wrote a little hello message in notepad and then waited. 10 secs later Mom started typing in notepad and we ended up having a nice chat. Then after that I connected to my office computer and checked my email and tied up some loose ends there. I tell ya…all this from the comfort of a nice easy chair in our room.
From now on, anytime we’re going to be stayin over at a hotel somewhere I’m going to be sure to bring along my laptop!