Router Madness

I happen to work in Greenwich Village, in Manhattan, which means I'm surrounded by tons of apartments. And in each one of these apartments, apparently, is a wireless router. There are dozens of networks available to me on any given day. See, I happen to be either too cheap or too poor to pay for my own wireless internet, so I pirate whatever signals are open to me.

I'm happy about the open networks, for obvious reasons. Some people don't secure their networks because they're too stupid; they don't know how to assign a password. Some are too lazy to read the manual, and learn how to assign a password. And some people simply don't want to secure their networks in an effort to screw over Big Telecommunications; they figure, if they're going to pay $100 a month for the service, they should let everyone use it all the time. Bless these communist bastards.

I'm amazed and amused by the names people give their network routers. There seem to be as many naming conventions as there are wireless modems. Some are simply the name assigned to the router at the factory. I've got a belkin54g, and a linksys, and a few AppleNetworks. A few people use their physical addresses. There's an apt14, apt7, and apt10. I see an 1849 (the name of a local bar), a villagecantina (a restaurant), and an olivetree (a cafe).

Some networks are really obscure. I have a kt, BMW, and Modern on my network list. What the hell are those? Someone really loves their car and had to name their modem after it? Does the person feel really modern using his Modern network? There's a JagerNetwork; gee, I guess someone really, really loves his Jagermeister. Someone loves the Golden State Warriors so much he's named his network GStateWarriors. Not sure what Ruth-Truth means, though I'm pretty sure it belongs to someone named Ruth. And someone loves someone so much, they named their network KenAndMike (which is actually kind of sweet).

My absolute favorite naming convention are the not-so-nice ones. Someone has named his "Your Mom," which is kind of in your face. Then there's the guy who calls his "MeatFlaps." (I don't really want to have to explain that one. Let's just say it's a part of the female anatomy). I'm certain if I had a wireless network router of my very own, I'd call it something like FuckOff or AssMunch.

A final note on the subject: Whoever runs the homeblk network in the West Village, thank you. You have the strongest open network I've been able to pirate. Now do you think you could stop going to the Hamptons every weekend so you can refresh your network when it goes down? Because I'm using Dynex right now, and it sucks.