Working Anywhere

Are You Now Paying For Papers At Hotels?

Much to my surprise the "free" morning paper all the years I've been staying in Hiltons now have a charge. USA Today, which for many years gave papers away at hotels in order to boost their circulation now carry a charge of .75 cents. If you don't want it, you have to tell the front desk.

Hilton Santa Clara (HBE)

An absolutely terrible experience in the heart of Silicon Valley.

In the middle of my mail sync with Exchange I got a pop up saying the hotel has detected improper activity coming from my computer (a Mac Book) and slowed my speed to 56k (not that it was great before with speeds in 200k download range.

What was I running? Entourage, Mac Mail, Skype, GizmoProject and Camino.

Overall Grade F -due to not telling me upfront they were monitoring

Speeds F Too slow to be called Broadband

Capabilities F VPN from HotSpotVPN did not work

Syncing mail was impossible

What proved this was I pulled out my EvDO Rev A modem and everything was working right and my mail was synced and downloaded in 5 minutes.

Provider is LodgeNet and their PR folks are working to have me talk with some senior technical folks next week.

Trustive Expands Into USA

Trustive, one of the global hotspot roaming programs has joined up with Wayport.

This opens up the USA market to Trustive's European subscribers.