I landed in Phoenix two hours ago en route to Dallas for Bar Camp and missed my connection because another plane was in our gate... So instead of arriving at 1:40pm, I'll be getting in around 4. Yuck. So why am I bothering to broadcast this on my blog? (I realize this sounds like a big whiny complaint, but there's a reason...) Because Port 80 is my sole vehicle for outgoing web communications at the moment. My email is blocked (another vote for moving entirely to Gmail), IRC is blocked, IM is blocked, Skype IM is blocked... I can't even send smoke signals via FTP. On top of that, my SMS is totally backed up and I haven't been getting texts for days. WTF? Now I know that more capable geeks would tell me to just tunnel into some other unblocked system, but c'mon, I'm a simpleton, remember? I expect (and need!) this stuff to just work. If this kind of service variability is the future of the networked environment, man, add that to DRM and we truly are EFFed. If we can't even rely on publicly-accessible (though privately sponsored) wifi for these basic communication channels, we've gotta think about who should really be in charge of these networks... Who cares about my robot breathren taking over when we're already turning our computers against us. Seriously. WTF.