Statistics Saturday: The WiFi Networks Detectable In Your Area

• home-123
• Comcast_sucks
• [ That cryptic alien squiggle thing from that one Doctor Who episode a couple years ago. ]
• ATT_sucks
• FBI Surveillance Van #69
• home-1138
• . – –     ..     ..-.     ..
• thegoodplace
• Aphid Kruschev
• Bill Wi The Science Fi
• internet-of-thingamajigs
• bobby tables privat wifi
• outernet
• Verison_suuucksssssS5SS5fiveSss
• xfinity
• Hipster-coffee-shop-Wifi
• Hipster-coffee-shop-Wifi-5G
• Buy_you_own_Wifi
• Comcast_really_sucks
• xfinity-wifi
• memory-gamma
• HOME-518
• Paul Blart, Mall Jeb!
• xfinity-wifi-sucks
• Why-Fhy
• landline
• [ something incomprehensible that just feels like it’s probably a Rick and Morty reference but you can’t imagine ever being the sort of person who could possibly work up the energy to figure out whether it is ]
• NSA Surveillance Van 420
• computers-were-a-mistake-5G
• THE CLOUD

Reference: Skyscraper: The Search for an American Style, 1891-1941, Roger Shepherd.

Twelve Things Only Rarely Mistaken For Pinball Machines Or One Another

1. Washcloths.
2. Date nut shortbread cookies.
3. Snails which race in the Indianapolis 500.
4. Stained glass.
5. That crossword puzzle plagiarism scandal.
6. Deceased New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.
7. The “Cover Up” pricing game on The Price Is Right.
8. Integration by trigonometric substitution.
9. Those seats in the movie theater lobby that demonstrate how the new premium-experience movie theater is kind of like the ordinary movie theaters, only the seats can shake I guess, so you understand why that’s a worthwhile upcharge when you go to see My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 For Some Reason?
10. Isobaric lines.
11. Band stickers for guitar cases.
12. Hipster coffee shop Wi-fi password “GoneWireless”.

Your Technology Requirements Of Next Week, Today

I had good reason to be in Best Buy during New Student Orientation Week but don’t ask me what it was. Whatever it was comes in second to what I found, a bunch of sheets listing the Technology Requirements for the various universities that students might be going to somewhere around here.

According to Best Buy, according to the various universities, students really ought to have some kind of laptop, because apparently they haven’t noticed students have merged with their iPhones to become a big mass of people with better things to do than notice there’s a professor trying to turn them into informed citizens. I’m delighted they recommend not just getting a laptop but also an operating system and one that’s compatible with Microsoft Office, the leading way to get documents which, on any system, can be read with random lines of XXXXX marks or weird glyphs wherever you’re supposed to sign your name.

Also recommended: anti-virus software, showing that they’re right on top of the big computer security news of 1996 there, and every one of the local universities recommends a laptop with “wireless capabilities”. I considered asking a clerk if they had any laptops without wireless capabilities but was worried that one, in the eagerness to please, would make a laptop wireless-uncapable by the normal expedient of putting it in a transporter pod so as to catastrophically merge its molecules with those of a cinder block.

I didn’t buy anything there.