WiFi Tour of Boston

I’m sitting here at my table at The Wrap, a burrito bar on Newbury Street in Boston. It’s the final stop on my tour of wireless Internet access points in Boston.

I started this morning at my hotel, Club Quarters on Devonshire. They have free WiFi access in the downstairs lounge and, also, given that I was staying above said lounge, WiFi in my room. Actually make that “WiFi in my room as long as I was sitting on the bathroom floor.” Hey, you take what you can.

Next stop: the Apple Store in the CambridgeSide Galleria, a large urban shopping mall near the Lechmere T stop. The Apple Store is as dreamy as the one I visited in Peabody last October: it’s a paragon of retail design, with about the best staff of any store I’ve ever come across. I was having trouble with my iTunes starting up slowly: I pulled up a stool at the Genius Bar (yes, that’s actually what it’s called) and Steve the friendly Genius spent 15 minutes with me diagnosing and fixing the problem (it was an old iTunes plug-in that I’d installed many months ago and forgotten about). The store is flooded with WiFi, and thet staff appear to take no offense at customers with Airport-equipped iBooks sitting on a bench and surfing away.

And finally here at The Wrap — a nice little burrito and smoothie place with patio where free wireless Internet is provided by the Newbury Open Network. So, in other words, I can sit enjoying my Pineapple Orange Gauva juice and my Bangkok (burrito with jasmine rice and peanut sauce) and surf the net at the same time.

The burrito is excellent and, for someone who started surfing the Internet at the end of a leased 14.4 copper wire on Victoria Row, the Internet access is, well, revolutionary.

The downsides? Well, ironically the credit card machine at The Wrap is broken today, so while I can sit here an book airline tickets to Rome and purchase the complete works of Shakespeare, I cannot pay for my burrito with my MasterCard.

Oh, and I just spilled jasmine rice on my trackpad.

Home tonight on MCA and back in action on Prince St. tonight.

Postscript: Here’s how you get wireless Internet access on your Airport equipped iBook: open the lid. That’s it.