Spent the Day Downtown

I reported to the main court-house juror’s area this morning promptly at 8:30 am. On the way in I thought I’d be late, because the security guard had no idea what an iPod was and I had to connect the headphones and let him listen to it before he believed me that it was just an MP3 player (while it may be more than that, I didn’t want to strech it with this guy). After he listened to a minute or so of Eminem he let me pass with the iPod. (Sidenote: Apple may have sold a lot of these iPods, but the average American still doesn’t know anything about them.)

After sitting through about an hour and a half of waiting and listening to the local governmental agency information about being a juror, my name was finally called for a jury pool. I had to fill out a questionaire, and then was told that I was to report to the designated court room at 1:30. 1:30? “Shit, there goes the day” I thought (The house is 45 minutes away. The office is 45 minutes away.) Then I thought, well, at least I’m downtown, I’ll hit the Starbucks and get online.

I ended up spending the morning totally un-connected from the internet. It’s amazing to me that downtown Fort Worth doesn’t have a well known public wireless access point. No one had one, nor could they tell me where one was avaialble… I was willing to pay for one even. No luck:

I went to the Flagship Barnes and Nobles on Sundance Square thinking that their Cafe would have wireless access since it’s affiliated with Starbucks, but I was wrong.

I went over to the locally owned and operated CoffeHaus… no internet.

I went to the main Public Library in downtown. They offered public internet access but only on outdated Windows computers with only web (http) access to anything. No public ethernet jacks, or wireless access. Not even a public phone jack I could use to dial-up on my Earthlink account.

I thought about walking around the Square with my laptop in my hands using MacStumbler to hopefully find an access point, then thought better of that idea. While it’d be cool to find an access point, my hopes were already dashed, and I was pressed for time.

So, I found a little chair and table in the downtown Tandy Center Outlet Mall (or whatever it’s called), set up my iPod, and worked on some stuff that I could do offline.

Ugh.

At about 1:00 I headed back over to the courthouse.

[later] It’s 4:30 now and I just got out of the courthouse… wasn’t selected for jury duty. Whew… looked like this one was going to take a few weeks. Sucks to be those jurors.