Report from Dallas (McKinney)

"Our first Dallas site is now live! We're stationed at the old McKinney, Texas WalMart just inside the old vision center. We have roughly 25 machines up and running on the internet. We worked all night on getting the local T1 up and running with no avail. We still have a chance on that line. We're currently running a bridged wireless setup from the old WalMart to the new WalMart. WalMart had some interesting high gain wifi gear laying around. So here's the scoup. The old WalMart (previously scheduled for demolition) has been retrofit with showers, cleaning facilities, living partitions, food preparation areas and a small datacenter! Thanks to WalMart for providing much of the nitpick gear and patience to make this thing possible. Thanks to Hotels.Com for providing ALL the PC's and the vast majority of the networking gear. Thanks to all the random volunteers for providing their time and fingers for making cable ! :)"

"The first people from new orleans are coming in today. They are absolutely ecstatic with the setup here. Many of the people have not seen nor heard news since the hurricane came through. They're reading news online for the first time in a week. All the people coming in extremely grateful at the people and the facilities here in McKinney. I'll be sending more photos into the powers at be shortly. Thanks again everyone for your help !"

Photos at:  http://publicwebstations.blogspot.com/2005/09/photos-from-dallas-mckinney.html
http://publicwebstations.blogspot.com/2005/09/second-batch-of-dallas-photos.html