Wireless Internet and the awesome power of the smart phone

Ok, so there's a bit of a story, and it's quite interesting.   Lauren actually just recently moved into this apartment so she didn't have the internet transfered in her name yet, and she didn't have any sort of wifi -- the internet has been accesible thus far through an ethernet cable plugged into the wall, and through a couple "open" but very weak wifi's floating around.

So the guy who came to transfer the internet over gets on my computer -- which was the one plugged into the ethernet at the time.  Not only is my computer in english, but it's also running linux (ubunt) so the machine is all but incomprehensible to him, with no linux experience and no english experience it must have been akin to trying to work a computer terminal on the alien mothership...  I figured he was probably going to look for the IP address so I opened up a terminal and put in the "ifconfig" command; which in linux speak means "interface configuration" and outputs the ip address.

In any case, he tried "ipconfig /all" until it got frustrating so I tried to walk him through it.  We got it -- he got the ip and the transfer was finished.

But that's not all.  Lauren wanted to find out if she could get wifi!  So he spends then next few minutes trying really hard to communicate that we need a router, saying the same two words over and over again.

Thanks to the unsecured wifi next door, and the power of google translate on my phone we managed to get through the next 15 minutes by me holding my phone up to his face, asking him if the speech recognition was correct, and reading the translation; then subsequently typing in my response and having him read MY translation.  It actually worked quite nice!  Lauren managed to explain that she already had a router, but didn't know the password because it was given to her by a friend --  then he reset it and and I asked if I could change the password (because honestly not having one is just plain dangerous...).

Since the 192.168.0.1 server in the address bar gave a firmware page full of hangul, he navigated until he got to the security page and I pointed to the "WPA2" setting and we were all done.

Then after he left, having the page still open I could change the SSID to "pink sparklz" -- mission accomplished.

On Monday Lauren's gonna buy a Samsung Captivate :P   and I'm gonna try really hard to find out if someone can get 3g to work on mine ;)