I finally get around to provide some EF20 feedback...
Thanks for your feedback!
1) The ridiculous prohibition of using your own electric cooler and the justification for banning it. I can understand, that they don't want any heating devices likes coffee makers or the like since those can run in the kilowatt range. But the typical electrical cooler uses a peltier element and maybe a fan, consuming something in the range of 60W. Compared to the hairdryer in the bathroom or even the room lighting and some laptops I have seen at work that's a not even worth mentioning. I seriously hope the Hotel doesn't try this again since it makes it impossible to take other prohibitions seriously.
It's actually not specific to electric coolers - you are generally not allowed to use electrical appliances in your room that go beyond a laptop or a cell phone charger. Be it a cooler, a heater, a soldering iron, a sewing machine, a popcorn maker, or (*sigh*) an electric cotton candy machine. We've communicated the problem with them, and they made a few concessions, for example, allowing small fans for fursuit drying - we could convince them that the hygienic consequences of wet fursuits outweigh the fire hazard. But the appliance ban will stay in place, and I'm afraid there is nothing we can do about it. There will however be a way to officially use the minibar as a regular fridge (this time for everyone), which we are going to communicate when the time has come.
2) If you tried to use one of those little 3G / WLAN routers or your smartphone as a WLAN AP in your room, you might have noticed that it didn't work very well, you got disconnected almost immediatly. This only started with the beginning of the Con, no problems were encounted before the con started (if you booked early arrival). It looked a suspiciously like a WLAN-Deauth-DOS-Attack if you have your phone directly next to the 3G/WLAN-Router and it can't establish a reliable connection. This attack works by spoofing the MAC address of your Router and sending a de-authentication packet which will disconnect your device from your AP. Please tell the Hotel to not do that again, it might backfire. After all, it wasn't done before the Con started.
I can assure you that no such thing was attempted. If you had problems like the ones you described, it was most likely a case of terribly congested WiFi spectrum - with both the hotels internal WiFi system and 2000 geeks with their own routers trying to fight for bandwidth. That being said, the solution they're using (courtesy of Cisco Systems) IS pretty hostile against competing networks. Not that it's programmed to actively attack anyone, but we (the staff) got a fair warning ahead of time, that to operate our own internal Staff WiFi, we would have to ask them to reserve channels for us.
We did, and it worked nicely. But since this is obviously not an option for everyone, and as it's unlikely they'll swap out their WiFi installation against any other type of system anytime soon, it's probably also one of those things we'll have to learn to live with.
