alex chiang: web 6.0

So Matt and I are in California on a business trip. Because we’re such nice guys, we decide to share a hotel room and save the company some money. The Courtyard Mariott has free internet in the room. Cool!

Upon further inspection, maybe not.

First off, they have this weirdo modem type thingy that has three ports on it: ethernet, USB, and RJ11. Ethernet is the obvious choice here because I’m not about to install el crappo driver to get internet over USB. Windows is already unstable enough, thanks.

Second, the ethernet cable they supply you with is about 2 feet long, so you are stuck working at the unergonomic desk and chair combination. Hello? I want to lay on your luxurious 600 thread count sheets and compute from the comfort of my own bed! What gives?

The solution to get around both these limitations (only one person can use the internet at once while sitting at their carpal tunnel inducing desk) is to use the network bridging feature built into Windows.

In this example, we let Matt plug into the shorty network cable. He then sets his wireless card into ad hoc mode, and creates a new network. Finally, he opens the network connections, selects the LAN and wireless, and bridges them together.

Alex then configures his wireless card to connect to the ad hoc network created by Matt. Windows thinks about it for a bit, and then Alex can sit back and read the entire internet from the comfort of his bed. Nice!

So take that, Mariott. Har har.

ps, yes, we do have Windows enabled laptops so that we can read our lovely Microsoft Office documents without waiting 5 minutes for OpenOffice to launch.