My wife gave birth to our second son last week, so I was out of the office all week. I brought my laptop with me to the hospital so I would be able to dump photos from the camera if the memory card filled up. While in labor and getting settled into the room my wife noticed that one of the signs in the room made a statement about there being free wifi throughout the hospital — this hospital opened just over one year ago.

Yatzee! I was superexcited to have free wifi. It was great because I could upload photos to Flickr, and post to my personal blog from the hospital. It was really nice to be able to get the news out quickly to a geographically spread-out audience.

There were two hitches, though, one of which I was able to work around. Both hitches are related. Because of the security/firewall rules on the “guest” wifi network I was not able to connect to my corporate VPN — both good and bad that I couldn’t get much work done (mostly good) — and I couldn’t connect to IM. While I couldn’t get around the VPN issue, I was able to use Meebo to get IM working for me. I’ve used Meebo sparingly in the past — I prefer the “feel” of a desktop IM client — but found Meebo to be the perfect tool in the perfect situation.