At this year’s National Technology Conference offers even less internet connectivity than past years. Although I was able to use wifi in the common area, today it is password-protected! In the hotel rooms we are asked to pay $16/day for a wired connection.
I’m told that presenters will get a pass word for their session, which especially sucks for people in the last session on the last day. But it also sucks for me in the first session because I am on in about 90 minutes and I need the Internet to prepare for and to do my session.
O, the irony of N-TEN’s promotion of the 06NTC tag for aggregating conference content. How the hell are we supposed to publish any content?
I need some coffee.
Sigh, if only cities recognized the utility of providing ubiquitous internet, maybe the conference centers and coffee houses of the world would stop charging us outrageously. I’m headed off tomorrow to a conference in Charlotte for the Young Democrats of North Carolina. But after I’ve spent half a hour prying at the hotel to see if I’m going to have internet access in the room where I’d like to be able to be teaching College Democrats how to use the internet-based groupware I’ve set up for them…
it looks like I might have to install apache on my laptop and fire up a local copy. 🙁
In words only too appropriate for a gathering of young southern Democrats, “I feel you pain.”
Ruby, I was in your first session at N-TEN–it was great! I appreciate that you gave out the wifi key to all the participants–your session would have been much less valuable to me if I hadn’t been able to visit and bookmark the session sites along with the presenters. (I, too, have been surprised at the strange, user-unfriendly wifi policies at NTC. Maybe by next year…)
Ruby, this reminds me of when I tried to take advantage of American Airlines deal to SXSW. The catch?? The gave you a 5% discount (or something like that) but you had to make the reservation by phone, so they charged you $15 per ticket for using the phone instead of the internet. Grrrrr!