I showed up this afternoon at Panera Bread to do some more grading, sat down at my favorite table near the fireplace, and fired up my laptop. Much to my surprise, there were two access points--the regular "Panera" SSID, and a brand new "SurfThing" SSID to accompany it.
Out of curiousity I selected the second, and was able to get online instantly--no login necessary (Panera requires a login, which is free but annoying, every two hours). Even better, there's no SonicWall filtering, which means I can even occasionally check blogs like Dooce and PlasticBag.com, both of which are blocked by SonicWall.
I'm somewhat baffled by the appearance of the SurfThing access point, since there are no other locations in this plaza that would be likely to offer access, and surfthing.com seems to indicate that they're a midwestern (minn/wisc) provider. (Their shockwave-based site won't work in Firefox, it seems...I had to load it in Safari.) But I'm certainly not complaining!
Ooh, thank you! Nice to know.
that's one of the things i love most about Panera! the wifi- at my panera in watertown, ma is always up and working - log on does take a moemnt, but really who cares - it's free! i just found this new blog site about panera - check it out if you are a fan - or even if you have some suggestions!
http://panerafan.blogspot.com.
hi, found your site because you got hit with "corporate propaganda" too. (it's not on my main page, though, it's the Feb 14th entry of my blog) I noticed you didn't talk about the food! :-)