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After reading the article in the morning tribune, (posted below and entertaining enough to justify taking a few minutes to read it all)
WHAT IS YOU FAVORITE NETWORK NAME?
My all time favorite that I noticed while riding the train "Guess my password I'll give you a BJ", but I really liked a few from the artilce.
WHAT IS YOU FAVORITE NETWORK NAME?
My all time favorite that I noticed while riding the train "Guess my password I'll give you a BJ", but I really liked a few from the artilce.
By Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune reporter
January 18, 2012
Alexandra Janelli is a Wi-Fi detective. She tracks the fleeting cultural and social thoughts of the city — as long as those fleeting cultural and social thoughts have been contained within the 30 or 40 characters of a wireless router name.
She is not paid to do this; she works as a hypnotherapist, helping clients with anxiety, stress and insomnia. She is a Wi-Fi detective for fun, collecting router names like rare birds and posting the oddest specimens on her website, WTFWiFi. Indeed, since becoming a Wi-Fi detective in 2009 — at first in her hometown of New York City, now in Evanston, where she moved with her fiance, who is attending Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management — Janelli has learned that there are a million stories in the naked city, and a lot of them are totally disgusting, creepy, cryptic or somewhat disturbing.
In New York, she stumbled on routers named "I eat babies for breakfast" and "tequila rabbi" and "I've seen you all naked." And since moving to the Midwest, she has found Wi-Fi networks around Evanston and Chicago named "Michael Jackson Day Care Service" and "Andrews Don't Snitch" and "Baby Loves Glue." In Bucktown, near a Mercedes dealership, she found "(Expletive) Mercedes." Alongside a Lake Shore Drive apartment building, she found "Stop looking in my windows."
In general, though, she said she has found that New Yorkers name their routers outrageous, inventive things, using wireless names to send shaming, cutting messages such as "fat man on 7fl is douche." And in Chicago, generally, we use router names to make oblique references to favorite films and TV series. "Everywhere you find there are routers named 'Dumbledore' and 'Hogwarts' and after 'The Lord of the Rings,'" Janelli said.
On Monday morning, we walked west on Davis Street in Evanston, Wi-Fi sleuthing. Janelli, who has long, chestnut-colored hair and big, dark eyes, wore a turquoise scarf and held her iPhone before her, watching router names appear on the screen then vanish a second later, replaced by different names. She carried the phone like a divining rod, pulling in fragments of thoughts and nicknames and factory codings.
"'WeltMeister,'" Janelli read off her phone. She considered that a moment. There were other names on her screen. Names like "2Wire808" and "Home 3." But these didn't concern her — these said nothing. So we continued walking, then stopped at Ridge Avenue. "Ah," she said, reading from the list of router names that had popped up on her phone: "Here we got 'Daddy's Boat' and 'Sex Town.'" We took a few steps to the south. The names vanished and a new wireless name appeared:
"Sis Seduced the Family."
She read it and made a face. "Ew," she said finally. This is what someone named a wireless router, she said, amazed. "What is that all about? That's got to be about something." When she first moved here, she said, she would go jogging in hopes of finding cool Wi-Fi names, "and occasionally I'd stop and find weird names like that. Or I would take the train and see what my phone picked up on the way." One day, also near Ridge, she found a router name that accused someone of being a child molester. It wasn't the first time she found a router name used to accuse someone of a crime. "But every time I'm, like, do I call the police? I don't know if it's a joke. I just keep saying, you could do an amazing 'Law & Order' based on Wi-Fi names."
Janelli started collecting Wi-Fi names in 2009. She was an environmental consultant in New York, collecting soil samples. It was summer, and she had just broken up with a boyfriend. "I was at this bar on the Lower East Side," she remembers, "sitting in the back garden area, and I checked my phone and it said, 'Do you want to join the network "Alcoholic Shut In"?' I looked at my friends and said, 'Do you think this is someone being ironic?' We all laughed, but I really wondered. So I started walking around that night and looking for Wi-Fi names, and I found people were naming their connections these funny and disturbing things. I wondered if anyone had a blog on this — and, I swear, I hate blogs. But I was just out of a relationship and I needed a hobby, and it was either going to be this or golf.
"So I started this, partly because it got me out of the house."
WTFWiFi was born, the latest website (think $#*! My Dad Says, Texts From Last Night, WTF Gamertags — and be warned that entries on WTFWiFi are just as profane and lewd) to archive the fleeting arcana of our cultural lives. In fact, Janelli began to archive so many Wi-Fi names, patterns emerged, trends appeared. Last year, a lot of people began naming their routers "Pretty Fly for a WiFi." At the moment, a lot of people are naming their routers "FBI Surveillance Van." But the names on WTFWiFi, submitted mostly by readers and herself, divide into a handful of categories. There are boastful names ("sweet cheeks," "sex all over this apartment"), mysterious names ("ungrateful ninja," "Mr. Skinny Jeans"), names that refer to pop culture ("Skynet," "Stately Wayne Manor"), schoolyard taunts ("pretty sure ur moms a hooker"), virtual keep-out signs ("Buy your own damn router") and, perhaps most cleverly, passive-aggressive router names intended to be happened upon by the subject of the name. For instance, "I can hear you having sex," "Stop cooking Indian" and "Stop singing karaoke at 1 am."
Janelli sees great promise in router names. She believes they could be a social network of sorts (though, as her fiance has pointed out, it's not as practical for sending direct messages), or used as viral marketing. She also sees it as a form of digital graffiti, invisible cultural markers that reveal a neighborhood's character.
As we drove out of Evanston, south on Sheridan Road, she sat in the passenger's seat with her phone before her, monitoring Wi-Fi names and giving a running commentary: When she first moved here, she said, she was disappointed by the router names. She worried that clever names might only be a New York thing. But the problem was one that she had encountered in New York — the more affluent the place (such as Evanston), and older its residents, the less interesting the names, "the more likely you get 'Jones family Wi-Fi.' And at first I got a lot of religious Wi-Fi names too. A lot of names in capital letters.
"Now you could drive me around and I could keep my eyes closed, and if you read the (Wi-Fi) names I could tell you if you were in a rich or poor community. On the train, when I see 'Our maintenance sucks' on my phone, I know I'm almost to Howard."
Indeed, as we passed through Evanston into Rogers Park, the Wi-Fi names did take on a different texture.
"Silver Bear" and "Trudy's Network" on Sheridan Road in Evanston gave way, at the city line, to Wi-Fi names such as "Stylin Marlin" and "Loud Whale." We drove southwest through Rogers Park and found "Black Power," then "Casa De Gato," then "SuperMonkeyDeathCar," then "burn that muther down." As we passed from Edgewater to Andersonville, the mood changed again, turning lighter: "Tunamonkeyfish," "Marcel the Shell," "Bonker's Revenge," "Lez B Honest" and "America F Yeah!" The only thing that surprised Janelli was the occasional router that pinpointed the router owner's physical address.
Back in Evanston, as we turned from Sherman Avenue onto Lake Street, Janelli said casually, "Oh, here's a good one. I've seen this one before: 'Abraham Lincoln's (expletive).' I looked (the phrase) up on Urban Dictionary. The router people got it wrong, I think. It's actually 'Abraham Lin(expletive). You know, I have learned a lot about society because of Wi-Fi names. Like, I saw one the other day, 'blue-footed booby.' I wondered what that was. So I looked it up online, and actually it was a bird. I wouldn't have guessed a bird."
cborrelli@tribune.com
January 18, 2012
Alexandra Janelli is a Wi-Fi detective. She tracks the fleeting cultural and social thoughts of the city — as long as those fleeting cultural and social thoughts have been contained within the 30 or 40 characters of a wireless router name.
She is not paid to do this; she works as a hypnotherapist, helping clients with anxiety, stress and insomnia. She is a Wi-Fi detective for fun, collecting router names like rare birds and posting the oddest specimens on her website, WTFWiFi. Indeed, since becoming a Wi-Fi detective in 2009 — at first in her hometown of New York City, now in Evanston, where she moved with her fiance, who is attending Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management — Janelli has learned that there are a million stories in the naked city, and a lot of them are totally disgusting, creepy, cryptic or somewhat disturbing.
In New York, she stumbled on routers named "I eat babies for breakfast" and "tequila rabbi" and "I've seen you all naked." And since moving to the Midwest, she has found Wi-Fi networks around Evanston and Chicago named "Michael Jackson Day Care Service" and "Andrews Don't Snitch" and "Baby Loves Glue." In Bucktown, near a Mercedes dealership, she found "(Expletive) Mercedes." Alongside a Lake Shore Drive apartment building, she found "Stop looking in my windows."
In general, though, she said she has found that New Yorkers name their routers outrageous, inventive things, using wireless names to send shaming, cutting messages such as "fat man on 7fl is douche." And in Chicago, generally, we use router names to make oblique references to favorite films and TV series. "Everywhere you find there are routers named 'Dumbledore' and 'Hogwarts' and after 'The Lord of the Rings,'" Janelli said.
On Monday morning, we walked west on Davis Street in Evanston, Wi-Fi sleuthing. Janelli, who has long, chestnut-colored hair and big, dark eyes, wore a turquoise scarf and held her iPhone before her, watching router names appear on the screen then vanish a second later, replaced by different names. She carried the phone like a divining rod, pulling in fragments of thoughts and nicknames and factory codings.
"'WeltMeister,'" Janelli read off her phone. She considered that a moment. There were other names on her screen. Names like "2Wire808" and "Home 3." But these didn't concern her — these said nothing. So we continued walking, then stopped at Ridge Avenue. "Ah," she said, reading from the list of router names that had popped up on her phone: "Here we got 'Daddy's Boat' and 'Sex Town.'" We took a few steps to the south. The names vanished and a new wireless name appeared:
"Sis Seduced the Family."
She read it and made a face. "Ew," she said finally. This is what someone named a wireless router, she said, amazed. "What is that all about? That's got to be about something." When she first moved here, she said, she would go jogging in hopes of finding cool Wi-Fi names, "and occasionally I'd stop and find weird names like that. Or I would take the train and see what my phone picked up on the way." One day, also near Ridge, she found a router name that accused someone of being a child molester. It wasn't the first time she found a router name used to accuse someone of a crime. "But every time I'm, like, do I call the police? I don't know if it's a joke. I just keep saying, you could do an amazing 'Law & Order' based on Wi-Fi names."
Janelli started collecting Wi-Fi names in 2009. She was an environmental consultant in New York, collecting soil samples. It was summer, and she had just broken up with a boyfriend. "I was at this bar on the Lower East Side," she remembers, "sitting in the back garden area, and I checked my phone and it said, 'Do you want to join the network "Alcoholic Shut In"?' I looked at my friends and said, 'Do you think this is someone being ironic?' We all laughed, but I really wondered. So I started walking around that night and looking for Wi-Fi names, and I found people were naming their connections these funny and disturbing things. I wondered if anyone had a blog on this — and, I swear, I hate blogs. But I was just out of a relationship and I needed a hobby, and it was either going to be this or golf.
"So I started this, partly because it got me out of the house."
WTFWiFi was born, the latest website (think $#*! My Dad Says, Texts From Last Night, WTF Gamertags — and be warned that entries on WTFWiFi are just as profane and lewd) to archive the fleeting arcana of our cultural lives. In fact, Janelli began to archive so many Wi-Fi names, patterns emerged, trends appeared. Last year, a lot of people began naming their routers "Pretty Fly for a WiFi." At the moment, a lot of people are naming their routers "FBI Surveillance Van." But the names on WTFWiFi, submitted mostly by readers and herself, divide into a handful of categories. There are boastful names ("sweet cheeks," "sex all over this apartment"), mysterious names ("ungrateful ninja," "Mr. Skinny Jeans"), names that refer to pop culture ("Skynet," "Stately Wayne Manor"), schoolyard taunts ("pretty sure ur moms a hooker"), virtual keep-out signs ("Buy your own damn router") and, perhaps most cleverly, passive-aggressive router names intended to be happened upon by the subject of the name. For instance, "I can hear you having sex," "Stop cooking Indian" and "Stop singing karaoke at 1 am."
Janelli sees great promise in router names. She believes they could be a social network of sorts (though, as her fiance has pointed out, it's not as practical for sending direct messages), or used as viral marketing. She also sees it as a form of digital graffiti, invisible cultural markers that reveal a neighborhood's character.
As we drove out of Evanston, south on Sheridan Road, she sat in the passenger's seat with her phone before her, monitoring Wi-Fi names and giving a running commentary: When she first moved here, she said, she was disappointed by the router names. She worried that clever names might only be a New York thing. But the problem was one that she had encountered in New York — the more affluent the place (such as Evanston), and older its residents, the less interesting the names, "the more likely you get 'Jones family Wi-Fi.' And at first I got a lot of religious Wi-Fi names too. A lot of names in capital letters.
"Now you could drive me around and I could keep my eyes closed, and if you read the (Wi-Fi) names I could tell you if you were in a rich or poor community. On the train, when I see 'Our maintenance sucks' on my phone, I know I'm almost to Howard."
Indeed, as we passed through Evanston into Rogers Park, the Wi-Fi names did take on a different texture.
"Silver Bear" and "Trudy's Network" on Sheridan Road in Evanston gave way, at the city line, to Wi-Fi names such as "Stylin Marlin" and "Loud Whale." We drove southwest through Rogers Park and found "Black Power," then "Casa De Gato," then "SuperMonkeyDeathCar," then "burn that muther down." As we passed from Edgewater to Andersonville, the mood changed again, turning lighter: "Tunamonkeyfish," "Marcel the Shell," "Bonker's Revenge," "Lez B Honest" and "America F Yeah!" The only thing that surprised Janelli was the occasional router that pinpointed the router owner's physical address.
Back in Evanston, as we turned from Sherman Avenue onto Lake Street, Janelli said casually, "Oh, here's a good one. I've seen this one before: 'Abraham Lincoln's (expletive).' I looked (the phrase) up on Urban Dictionary. The router people got it wrong, I think. It's actually 'Abraham Lin(expletive). You know, I have learned a lot about society because of Wi-Fi names. Like, I saw one the other day, 'blue-footed booby.' I wondered what that was. So I looked it up online, and actually it was a bird. I wouldn't have guessed a bird."
cborrelli@tribune.com
ACK!
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