Geeking for wireless after storm halted electricity at home

I had a productive day at the office, and all was going well until around 6pm when darkness descended an hour or so earlier than usual. I then noticed that one layer of dark clouds was galloping along from the east to the west, and another, darker and lower was cantering in from the west to the east. They locked blades and sparks flew - a moment later there was torrential downpouring of clear blood washing the streets below. The rain lasted around half an hour but had the undesired effect of killing the electricity supply to our building. Annoyingly, ours was the only building within eyeshot to be affected. After a while of doing what we could with our bare eyes as the last light drained away, we left the place to get a bite to eat. I brought my laptop and other work bits and after eating went to Number 5 cafe as I know they have wireless Internet there.

I asked the bloke for the wifi key and he gave me a phone number - that seems quite normal here. But it didn't work, so he kept telling me to try different variations of it, with no variation on the success front. So I put on my geek hat and went to his computer where he was watching some American cop programme. I opened up the command prompt and typed in "ipconfig"; ah, the gateway was at 192.168.1.1. So I opened up a browser and navigated to that address to be greeted with a username/password dialog. On my second attempt I cracked it (not hard, really, it was "admin/admin"). My next hurdle was the User Interface in Chinese. I looked for the character for "wu", as in "wu xian" (without cable), and found it on the left hand side. Upon clicking it showed me all the wireless details, including the SSID so I knew I was connected to the right place, and then, lower down, the password "12345". Phone number my arse.

So I was connected, but it seemed incredibly slow. I just hooked up to the VPN but still couldn't get emails. I changed name servers to the google ones and this helped a bit as I was able to surf slowly without the VPN but it was no good for work, other than to IM colleagues I wouldn't be able to make that day's meeting. I gave up at midnight and went home. Tan was there and at least because of the moist atmosphere it was not hot, and we had a cooling breeze through the bedroom. The kids, though, spent another night at Er Jie's house in one of the air-conditioned bedrooms.