The Lair

Got back on Tuesday night from a whirlwind trip to ye olde capital city - London. Other than a very interesting dinner at a Turkish restaurant where I gorged myself on baklava and the intriguingly named kayisi tatlisi (sundried apricots filled with cream and stuffed with pistachio nuts), there wasn’t really much to note. Oh darn, almost forgot. I tried Turkish coffee - which is much like ordinary coffee except that filters and strainers are considered redundant according to Turkish custom. Drink too deeply of the coffee and be prepared to cough up coffee grounds for the next couple of days.

My check for open access wifi continued on this trip. I don’t actively try cracking anyone’s encryption, that being both illegal and rather silly - my proof of concept is to hop on an open AP and surf to Google or Yahoo or some other random page once, then leave. Armed with the directory and a few tools of the trade, I tried checking for access points from the 6th floor hotel room. Active APs found: 40+. Unencrypted : just about 10. Most of them belonged to the hotel - and that throws every request into a login page. Wow. No open APs near Bloomsbury. As a colleague noted, it must have been a poor area of town.

Undeterred, I tried again when we moved to the conference venue on Savoy Place. Same result. About 10 APs found, most encrypted. The only open APs belonged to the conference venue, so using those would be uh - cheating. And even those weren’t open in the sense of being freely accessible, but required a username and password for access.

So I’m sitting in one of the conference halls with a colleague, both of us have our notebooks propped on our knees when this guy walks in holding a notebook computer of his own. He sees the two of us working - yes, we were actually working ! - walks over and asks “Oh I say, you wouldn’t happen to have found an access point for wireless, would you ?”. The conference was mostly inhabited by senior management types from various companies. We were the supposed academics in the bunch. When senior management types know about wardriving and hopping onto open APs, well.. that means it’s pretty much mainstream, huh ? Say bye-bye to free wireless internet, folks.

And I finished book 11 of the Wheel of Time series last night. Things happen in this book and several major plot threads are resolved. Most tellingly though, the one before last paragraph of the book has the same phrase that set the theme for Book 6. I suspect a red herring in the use of that phrase, but who knows ? Maybe RJ has abandoned all attempts at subtlety. As with the celebrated Harry Potter series, it’s now possible to see the light, however fleeting, at the end of the tunnel. Considering that the first RJ Wheel of Time book was released in 1990, I’d say it’s about time too. But overall, this book is lots better than book 10 and probably better than book 8 or 9, purely because more story lines are resolved. Click to read some spoilers… If you’re reading this off a feed, uh .. sorry.

In short, someone big from the Forsaken gets captured. The Seanchean becomes everyone’s favourite ally of the moment. We discover that the theories about Semirhage’s identity were right all along. The raiding Shaido are neutralized. Rand needs to relearn the sword forms. Tuon reveals the prediction made by the damane in Book ummm.. 7, was it ? . Egwene moves closer to uniting the White Tower. The Black Tower is clearly split in two - and members of both factions both bond and are bonded by Aes Sedai… That’s about it, really.