[gui-talk] using Wy Fi in a coffee house like a Starbucks

[Joel Deutsch]

Where I live, such cafes are filled with people writing screenplays and 
doing homework and all sorts of stuff on their tables at the coffee houses. 
I was forced out of my house earlier today because of pest control, long 
story, so I went to a nearby cafe where, in fact, the table next to the one 
I could take was occupied by a young guy working on a laptop.

He plugged in my laptop for me, and told me the cafe had Wy Fi. But I tried 
to go online but got an error message of some sort that I couldn't read 
because I'm not a good-enough Jaws jockey.

I asked a sighted IT friend what could have happened, and he said I'd 
probably have to have asked someone at the cafe for help getting hooked up 
with Wy Fi. He says it's real visual, a bunch of pop-ups and menus that seem 
mostly graphical to him.

any advice?
 BTW I have an Acer laptop running under WinXP. I use OE and IE8.

Thanks,
Joel
men7u