I Got Dem Holiday Inn Blues

[Charles Martin]

> From: Signhelpers <mike at signhelpers.com>
>
> Friday afternoon: I'm staying in a Holiday Inn in Madison, WI this
> weekend. The desk answers the phone proclaiming "FREE HIGH-SPEED
> INTERNET ACCESS IN ALL ROOMS". they neglect to mention "FOR WINDOZE
> ONLY."
>
This is simply not true. TCP/IP is TCP/IP and doesn't give a fig what 
platform you are using. Indeed, most of the machines that PROVIDE that 
"high speed internet" are themselves NEITHER Windows or Mac, but UNIX 
servers.

In Mac OS X, you probably need do nothing. Plug in the Ethernet cable, 
change your TCP/IP setting in the Network system pref to Show: Built-in 
Ethernet, "Using DHCP," wait a few seconds, boom.

Wireless is a slightly (sometimes) trickier story, but you didn't 
mention wireless so I'm assuming they had an RJ45 jack in the room like 
most hotels these days do.

> They have no list of IP numbers.
>
Well of course they don't. You (nor they) don't need it. They are 
supplied automatically by the DHCP server.

You might google up a page on "cable modems and Mac" or find the 
relevant page in the Apple Help or Knowledgebase and email it to those 
guys at the Holiday Inn for reference. That will help them FAR more 
than attempting to find out their IP and DNS info (which they've 
clearly never needed before, so to their minds Macs must be WAY more 
difficult than PCs).

_Chas_

"The Mac interface is not 'sexy', and it would be grotesque to want it 
to be. It is, in fact, playful, often well over the line into 
frivolity. The bouncing icons (and the puffs of smoke and the 
pipe-organ speech synthesizer and the way dialogs tidily resize and the 
drop-shadows on the windows and the jellybean buttons and the eject key 
on the keyboard) are not individually rationalizable on utilitarian 
grounds, and they do not pretend they mean to be. They are there to, in 
aggregate, change the nature of your relationship with the device. They 
are joyful, and they hope their joy is infectious." -- Glenn McDonald