I decided to take a last minute trip to Belize with Lisa to meet up with Jed who has been traveling around Mexico for the last few weeks. Lisa found a $360 ticket at 8 PM leaving at 12:30 AM so we packed, hit up a Taqueria for a goodbye burrito and beer and BARTed to SFO.

I had some last minute work I had to get done this morning, and a 3 hour layover at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. I haven’t jailbroken my old-school iphone since I upgraded the firmware, so I didn’t have a good way to tether it to my laptop, nor did I have an SSH application on my phone, so I had to buy the $7.95 airport wifi provided by Boingo.

I opened up firefox and after sitting through a flash intro on the boingo website, I entered my credit card info. After a confirmation screen, I was presented with the data I had entered and asked to download the GoBoingo Utility, an application that could run on my PC and notify me whenever I am within range of a Boingo hotspot. Clicking “Download and Install” was the only way to continue purchasing internet access.

Only after beginning the download was the page redirected to the page announcing that my credit card info was incorrect. I retyped my info and even tried a different credit card with no success. Noticing how quirky the website was, I decided to open Internet Explorer just to see if perhaps this form couldn’t be completed in Firefox.

After downloading the GoBoingo toolbar for the 6th time (this time in IE) I was given a page showing that my credit card details had worked.

Not only did they make me download unwanted software (note: you just had to download the .exe file, it is up to you to install it) but I had to use IE. What if I was using a mac? Would I have been locked out of wifi at George Bush Intercontinental?

I was able to complete the necessary work before getting on my plane to Belize. If you ever run across a boingo hotspot, make sure you are using IE.

1. Tab Mix Plus: Allows you to control how you browse by opening tabs for events you specify. This gives you full control over what happens when you browse, and when new windows get opened, recycled, or new tabs get opened.
2. IE View: This adds an item to your right click menu that opens the current page in Internet Explorer. Some poorly designed pages require the use of internet explorer, and as a web developer I am constantly checking my pages in both browsers.
3. del.icio.us extension: If you use del.icio.us to keep track of sites & bookmarks, you can replace your firefox bookmarks completely with this extension. Its also a great way to keep bookmarks synced between computers if you have more than one. It gives you the option of displaying del.icio.us bookmarks in a toolbar.
4. Web Developer Extension: If you don’t do web design, you don’t need this. However, if you do, you need this more than you can imagine. My favorite feature is the “edit CSS” which allows you to play with a page’s CSS in real time to see the changes. Other useful features are outlining block level elements, and turning off images.
5. DOM Inspector: This goes great with the web developer toolbar for anyone dealing with web design. It allows you to examine any element on a website and see what its parents are and all of its properties
6. Google Toolbar: This allows Easy searching of google news, froogle, google, images, and groups. It also has a very useful spell checker for web forms and displays search terms at the top of the page. You can click on them to jump to the point in the page where the term appears, which is useful for wordy pages.
7. BugMeNot: When you get to a site that requires free registration, you can right click on the login field and select bugmenot. This anonymously logs you in saving time and privacy.
8. Adsense Notifier: If you use google adsense to monetize your website, this statusbar extension will show you how much money you made today and the number of views and clicks.
9. FireGPG: This extension provides an interface to encrypt, decrypt, sign or verify the signature of text in any web page using GnuPG. This allows you to send emails securely.