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04/30/2007 Archived Entry: "Metalab in Vienna and other free Wifi"
Saturday was our last full day in Vienna. I really wish we'd found Metalab earlier, but I forgot to do a web search for free Wifi before leaving Graz. Our Vienna hotel was very nice in many ways, but their price for WiFi (five Euros for an hour) I consider robbery! So I took the laptop down to the lobby, paid their money, and googled for Vienna Free Wifi. I found this collective of techy folks, located a basement just a few blocks from City Hall (the Rathaus in German). On one of their pages in English, I saw the words "Public Terminals and free W-LAN" (W-LAN is the German term for WiFi, I think) and I knew we should go over there.
I think Jack was dubious as we were walking there, but once we found it, got online, and started talking with the guys who were hanging out there we both enjoyed it and felt very comfortable. I spent most of my time catching up with email (boring problems meant I hadn't been able to update my daily crawl blog list or check email for a few days) and Jack discussed digital photography and music with three guys (nex was one of them) in the Lounge. See all of Jack's photos tagged metalab.
The other place I found free WiFi in Vienna was a cafe/bar near the hotel. The Porzellan Cafe was very nice and the people very friendly. Address is Porzellangasse 3, on the D tram line just a few blocks from the Ringstrasse.
Replies: 1 Comment
W-LAN is just an odd (mis)spelling of WLAN, wireless local area network. WiFi is a (nowadays pretty much genericized) trademark of the WiFi Alliance. I just had to look that up to make sure WLAN really is a proper English term, because we really do use a few pseudo anglicisms that could easily look like perfectly normal English to us, but would puzzle a native English speaker, e.g. Beamer (video projector), Ego Shooter (first person shooter).
Posted by nex @ 04/30/2007 06:56 AM PST