Bad Wi-Fi Hotspot Locations

Special thanks to James Clayton, Michael Davis, Kenn Gorman, Gary Hoke, Jeremy Johnson, Joe LaGreek, Gregory Mamayek, John Martin, Nick Nielsen and Scott Winberg for their submissions.

Nobody knows the trouble you've seen--especially frustrated users and corporate bigwigs, who have no tolerance for the downtime that inevitably comes to all who brave the world of the wide Web. It's time to take back control with this foolproof letter of apology.

"Dear Corporate Users,

We have a down Internet connection. Someone deleted the Internet when he dragged the little blue 'e' to the recycle bin. We are working with our Internet service provider to restore the whole World Wide Web using tape backup. This will take some time, because the backup storage facility is on another planet. With NASA currently grounded, we will have to enlist the aid of the Russian space agency. We appreciate your forbearance."When the network returns to normal, send this follow-up message:

"To all users: The Soyuz capsule was able to retrieve the tapes and restore the WWW. Thank you, Russians! Three cheers for the cosmonauts!"

With RFC 1149 firmly standardizing the protocol of carrier pigeons, it was only a matter of time before someone took this notion of harnessing animal power to the next level. Here's a new one found on the Web:

"The Otherpower.com staff thought of building a hamster-powered night-light a couple of years ago at a rather, uh, soused company Christmas party. Then recently, Analise, an eighth-grader from Albuquerque, N.M., contacted DanF through the AllExperts.com Science For Kids forum, asking, 'Can a rodent generate enough electricity to power a light by running on its wheel?' That was enough inspiration for us to start the project, and we soon added Skippy the Hamster to the Otherpower.com payroll."We hope Skippy gets flextime. Check out Skippy in action.