On my second day in Maui, I got a serious case of Information Anxiety.
I wonder how much email I got? Is there anything important happening in
the news? What’s YHOO at? Since we apparently have the only cable
system on the planet that doesn’t have the weather channel, what’s the
weather going to be like here for the next few days?

My plan to connect my Treo to my laptop using WirelessModem didn’t
work. For some reason, the Treo couldn’t talk to the laptop. I would
have tried it at home, but it was demoware and I didn’t want to install
it and then have it expire halfway through the trip.

I popped in my wifi card and got a few blips, but nothing I could
connect to from inside the condo. So I opened the door and started
wandering around through the condos in the dark, scanning for networks.
I got a few, but I couldn’t connect to them. Finally – gold! – a
network named ‘default’ meaning someone took their wireless router out
of the box, plugged it in, and did nothing to it. It was wide open,
gave me an IP address, and I was connected.

The only problem was that I was now standing in the middle of a road in
the dark. There wasn’t really anywhere to sit down, so I just stood
there. The glow of my laptop must have made me really stand out. Cars
went by and I got buzzed by the community security guy on his golf cart
as I downloaded my email. Another guy on a bike laughed as he went by
and asked me if I was “pirating an internet connection.”

I was standing in front of a trash dumpster with the laptop on top when
the security guy made his third pass and stopped to ask me what was up.
I told him what I was doing and he seemed satisfied and took off.

It felt good to get current again, even though I’m supposed to be on
vacation. I didn’t check my work email or anything, so it’s not like I
was working, just seeing what was going on in the world. I’ll have to
see if I can scope out a less conspicous spot tomorrow to get my next
fix.