Roslindale No-Fi

When I went down to Rozzie Square today for my weekly fix of chicken massaman curry, I took my laptop to try out this newfangled city-sponsored Wi-Fi hotspot. Bottom line: I should have left the laptop at home.

The full report:

I parked myself down under a tree in Adams Park, across the street from the Colubris access point mounted on the roof of the old municipal building. Did a site survey. Picked up "bostonwifi." Tried to connect to Universal Hub (so I could post about how I was posting from under a majestic tree in a park). Got redirected to a login page at wireless.colubris.com - featuring absolutely no information about how a member of the public should log in to use this public wireless access point. So I hit enter - and got back an "unauthorized" sort of message. I tried "bostonwifi" as a user and hit enter. This time, I got back:

The service is initializing, please try again later.

Which apparently is access-pointese for "Shutting down now, go away," because when I did try again later, I connected to the access point, which now showed no connection at all to the Internet. I'm not the only one to have problems with the service. Seems the power to the access point keeps going off.

So for now, if you're in Rozzie Square and you just HAVE to connect, walk a couple blocks over to Emack & Bolio's, where the wireless is free and has actually worked the two times I've tried it. Or try the BPL branch on Washington Street, which also has Wi-Fi.

Is that access point high atop the Roslindale Community Center mocking me?