I kept my promise to Michel Poulin, owner of the “Planète Sans Fil” hotspot. His hotspot had been removed from our map because we were having issues every now and then. After some discussion with Alexis, I decided it was more humane to call him and find out if he still wanted to participate in ÃŽSF. He was enthusiastic to get back on the map, so I promised to visit him.

Tuesday 6th June, I was in the new Presse Café hotspot for its “Grand Opening”, I called Michel P. I got there a few minutes early, but there was no answer to his Enterphone. I started to wonder if he had ditched me, then the inside door opened, and he thrust his face at me saying ‘’ÃŽle Sans Fil?”. And what a face - Capitaine Haddock aged a few years - a nautical cap over twinkling brown eyes, a bulbous nose and a trimmed white beard.

He took me up to his second floor unit - one bedroom, a small kitchen, and a cluttered living room with a view. And what a window! Full of planters and bird feeders (humming bird and chardon). His view of theOld Port is limited by the taller building on the other side of Marguérite d’Youville St. - which also affects the signal coverage (Fresnel Zone diffraction, eh?).

His cluttered desk reveals his passion for the online life - PC, wireless mouse, printer, stacks of printouts… On a small table between the PC and the window are his links to the online world - Speedstream ADSL modem and WRT54g WiFi access point/router.

We got right down to business. Michel had simply unplugged the WRT Internet cable from the modem, and connected his PC their. He thought it was either his PC or the wireless world that could use the modem. I plugged his PC into LAN port 1 of his router and we were back in business. And you should have seen the smile! A priceless moment for me.

Precious moment #2: He shushed me with a finger to his lips, and pointed over my shoulder to another curious visitor. A very young redwinged-blackbird, a frequent visitor here, was cocking his beady eyes at the router’s blinking lights. Michel said “He damn near landed on your shoulder!”
After that, I started measuring his signal strength using Cirond PocketWinc on my iPAQ. He was fascinated, and asked me if he thought his condo neighbours could use his signal. It’s an old stone block building, but the interior walls are modern plasterboard. We did a walkabout with the iPAQ, and confirmed that his entire corridor could pick up the signal. That pleased him, too.

When we got back to his place, I set about lecturing him on how to check the cabling, how to power cycle the modem and the router. I drew him a block diagram, with the perrennial Internet cloud on the left, and his antenna on the right. He got that. I labelled the connectors on the diagram, and he decided to colour-code the two blue network cables. He put a ring of red packing tape on each end of the cable from the “ENET” port of the Speedtream to the “Internet” port of the WRT54g. Then I labelled the diagram’s “Rouge” cable accordingly.

He then showed me his hobby sites http://www.puffun.com/ and http://www.funfou.com/ - And we talked about his problem with the domain name “puffun”. It seems there is a company claiming priority of the trademark ‘’Puffuns” - http://www.puffuns.com/ .

Michel has received a legal notice that he must cease and desist using the puffin.com domain name because it abrogates the copyright of Glynn Incorporated. I suggested he could reach a lot of sympathetic ears on our Volunteers’ Mailing List, provided he marked his post “OT”. But he didn”t seem to grasp the 20th-century concept of a mailing list - even though I showed him my GMail inbox chock full of [isf-vol] and [isf-op] posts.

So on that depressing note I took my leave of the Planète Sans Fil and went to take in the upbeat atmosphere and delicious menu of the Daylight Factory.