Free wi-fi and a cup of vanilla chai make up a favorite combination of mine. Though I hold no particular allegiance to any one, local cafè, I do tend to spend most of my time at Aroma. I think that has a great deal to do with my old friend, Brian, who left the area a couple years back to pursue his dream of breaking into the professional CG industry (e.g. Pixar). He used to spend a great deal of his time here (I'm in Aroma, now), laboring over his latest creation. Well, to make a long story short, I guess his fondness for the place rubbed off on me, and--well--here I am.
In any case, a week or two ago, I noticed that the Aroma AP was getting crowded by a lot of other, nearby AP's on the same frequency--specifically, channel 6. I had noticed the wireless collisions in the past but had never investigated them. It turned out that, save for a more distant AP on channel 10, channel 11 was completely open, while channel 1 was in use by a next-door neighbor.
Upon seeing this, I decided to lend Aroma a hand and help get one or two more laptops squeezed into that poor, little 54 Mbps connection. I sent them an e-mail telling them what I had found and how to go about changing things for the better, then I went back to work, went on vacation for a few days, and forgot about the whole thing.
Today, I stop back by for the first time in a couple of weeks, and what do I find? The AP with SSID aromalink1 has stumbled onto channel 11, and though it hasn't made an enormous difference when there are 10 people trying to connect at once, it does seem a touch more responsive. At the very least, I feel like I was rewarded for my efforts, and that's more than worth the couple of minutes I spent writing a single e-mail to help out one of my favorite haunts.
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