Going Solo

We will have power outlets. We will have wifi.

One word of caution, however:

• the power outlets are Swiss — not European, Swiss
• we have one wifi base station and lots of bandwidth, which should be fine — but please be gentle.

Some details.

Swiss power outlets look like European ones: two round holes. But they’re slightly smaller holes than some (if not most) European outlets. Bring an adaptor.

We’ll try to put outlets all over the place in the main hall, so there should be plenty for everyone.

Conference wifi is one long painful topic. I’ve given a hard time to more than one conference organizer for their flakey wifi, so I’m quite prepared for a return of justice and you lot giving me a hard time if things go wrong. However, I’ve seen the numbers of the setup Swisscom is providing us, and I think we’ll be just fine. I’d like to remind you, though, of some “play nice” practices for conference wifi:

• quit Skype: yes, I know many of you are addicted to Skype group chats — but Skype is P2P and with lovely conference bandwidth available, chances are the network might pick you as a supernode, routing a whole lot of traffic through your little computer — and the conference broadband. Use the IRC backchannel instead (download mIRC for Windows or Colloquy for OSX if you’re not set up for IRC yet).
• don’t use P2P: Going Solo is not the day to download music, videos, or start torrenting — there are way more interesting things to do there!
• keep your bandwidth usage conference-related: feel free to upload photos and videos of the conference, but catch up on your general Flickr upload backlog or surf YouTube from your hotel room or at some other time, thanks.
• blogs and e-mail are fine: these are not bandwidth-heavy activities, so go ahead (we hope you’ll find the programme compelling enough to leave your inbox alone for a few hours, though ;-))
• if things flake out, wait: if you can’t get on the wifi, or the internet access seems clogged, give it a few minutes before trying again.

Thanks for your help!