The Post In Which I Decide That An Essay Is Not Always Required; or, how to get your phone to connect to the wifi at Starbucks.

So, yeah, it's been a while. I have many Weighty Things about which I'd like to write, but these require a lot of Heavy Thought, which of course means a metric fuckton of editing and revising, even after I get it all down on paper.

Sitting here in Starbucks, it occurs to me that maybe, just maybe, I should post whatever's on my mind, whether it's a Deep Thought or not. I'm not exactly going to go for quantity over quality, but as I am fond of saying about many things, I'm going to stop letting the perfect be a barrier to the possible or even the perfectly fine.

So, today's post:

Why won't my phone connect to the wifi at Starbucks?

I've got my laptop and my phone here, and my laptop connected just fine with a popup window, but my phone kept saying "data connection not available" when I tried to update the weather in my weather app, and the proxy window would not come up in Chrome. I tried forgetting the connection, diddling with other settings, but it was actually much simpler.

Chrome would not bring up the proxy login window to log me in to Starbucks, so I went to the stock browser. (T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S5, or SM-G900T.) Bingo! That's it. I clicked "Accept" there, and everything else worked.

As usual, YMMV, but I can see that this might be an issue on many phones, as many like to always consider their stock browser the only browser for some core tasks, even if you set it as the default.