I have nothing but sympathy for the networking folks here at Strong Angel. They've worked incredibly hard on providing Internet access but have encountered a classic tragedy of the commons.

Which is fascinating, when you think about it. Because this is an exercise filled with smart-to-brilliant technology folks, who all surely realized that when everyone banged on the available wifi network at the same time, it would not hold up.

Yesterday, Eric Rasmussen finally put down the hammer on the access problem. He ordered everyone off the system and told the network guys to make it work. It got up, sort of, by late yesterday afternoon.

This morning, I arrived to find access iffy at best. So now I'm on a wired connection, having found a big switch and an Ethernet cable that's now plugged into my computer. To use it I've switched tables, but this is a small inconvenience next to the larger one of having been pretty much offline for the past two days. (Compounding that situation was a slow-to-no connection at my hotel, a local Best Western, that didn't deliver on the advertised "high-speed" Internet access. I'm about 36 hours behind on answering email...)

The real-world situation this all mirrors, of course, is the problems in New Orleans after Katrina. Plainly, the networking community has a lot of work to do.