Photos from last night’s WiFi Meetup

Last night’s WiFi meetup at SpaHa was pretty cool, and Boss Ross got some photos too!

The venue, SpaHa, is two-storey restaurant and lounge that located in the most unlikely-semming place: inside the new graduate residence at the University of Toronto. It’s far too stylish and comfortable to be a campus pub, and the food and drinks are pretty good. They had Stella Artois on tap, and they made a pretty decent burger.

Their WiFi was provided by Spotnik. I didn’t have a Spotnik account, and Spotnik Girl, Accordion City’s local Spotnik marketing person wasn’t around to hand out those free cards that entitled you to one hour of free Spotnik WiFi. I didn’t have any pressing need to get online anyway, as the company was so good.

In attendance were:

• Boss Ross
• Darryl Green
• Jason Slaughter
• Sam Walker
• Eldon (not the Eldon who’s normally in this blog, but another Eldon)
• Noel
• Bull
• Joy
• Brent Ashley
• Tim Aiello

We discussed a lot of tech, but managed to get some WiFi talk in too, thanks to Brent Ashley, who reigned supreme with the cool gadgets. He showed us his Zaurus, which had a WiFi card plugged into its PCMCIA adapter, which hangs from a hinge, sort of like the cover to Captain Kirk’s communicator on the old Star Trek. The Zaurus runs Linux, and he had a VNC window showing his home machine’s screen, as well as several terminal windows, one of which was running good old Midnight Commander. His laptop also had WiFi by way of a USB WiFi box not much larger than a box of matches. He got it for CDN$35.

I’d like to send an extra-special thanks to Brent for the birthday present he got me: a “Tank Fighter + Brick Game” handheld toy, which “plays 9999 games”. It would appear that it actually plays ten games, most of which have 100 skill levels (one must have shortchanged, having only 99). However, it does play a very challenging game of Tetris and costs a mere CDN$3. We wondered what kind of processor it held, and how much it would’ve cost back in the good old days when Brent was working at my favourite Queen Street hangout back then, Arkon Electronics, when the RCA 1802 microprocessor sold for a hundred or so dollars. You can see photos of the handheld game at Ross’ blog.