Quick Hit: My Hotel is Evil
At first, I thought my hotel was weird. I mean. I have pictures to prove it.
The story of how I finally ended up here is almost an entire post in itself1, but I didn’t actually settle into the hotel until this evening, after the 5:20 Glasgow - Oban train, and the full day on Mull and the other islands. I want to get on the internet, and I see these notes about the WiFi.

I’m a bit pissed. I really expect only a few things from a hotel: a clean, comfortable room; a hot shower; and good power and connectivity. Decent WiFi2 is now baseline for traveling in the UK. But, I digress. This is not what makes the hotel evil.
I take some time to get set up, and get things charging. Then, I get ready to connect to my phone, and say a silent thanks that my job comes with free data.

I see it. It’s a bit weird. It asks for a password. I wonder if I am being trolled. I put on a pair of trousers, and walk down to the weird reception area. I re-read the sheet. I go back up to my room, give it a go. It doesn’t work.
I’m momentarily relieved. At least I can keep up my rightous indignation at Expedia that sold me this hotel without any WiFi! Then, I notice, it’s a long password. Maybe there’s no spaces.

The Mac thought about it for a second, and then connected. I’ve been using it for about an hour now, and it’s just working3.

This is really first class trolling. It’s just perfect, but it also means I have to spend some time exploring this hotel in the morning. Something like this can’t be a one-off thing. The owner thought it through, and I hope it’s not a one-off thing.
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tl;dr: Alarm didn’t go off in Madrid, missed my flight to get me to my train, so took a later train, but then that got delayed for an hour and half because of a disruption. Ended up getting to my hotel in Glasgow at 23:00 for a 5:20 train. ↩
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Somewhere, I still have my original WaveLAN PC-card. It was a large, awkward, not-quite dongle thing. Someone should do an in-depth history of exciting innovations in PC Cards over the years. ↩
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I’m installing Lightroom on this machine, and the download is a bit slow, but that could be entirely because I’m in fairly rural Scotland, and there’s just not a lot of bandwidth coming out here. ↩