Category: bristol

at this rate i’m going to find it very difficult to review anywhere else 😉

with the free muffin with my coffee this morning. Still the only cafe I have found on park street, bristol with free, reliable, in-house wifi. Mind you i’ve only tried a couple so far…

I have hatched a plan to satisfy both my urge for expensive coffee variations and the idea of wifi breakfast nirvana on park street in clifton, Bristol. Or near park street, as it seems that there aren’t actually many places to get breakfast on park street at 8.30. My plan is to do this once a week (because of time and money constraints)
Here are my criteria:-

• On my route to work (or a slight diversion of)
• Free Wifi (streetnet should cover most of the area, but in-house even better)
• nice coffee
• Somewhere to sit with a laptop preferably away from the gaze of passing pedestrians

Today I find myself in Boston Tea Party. Upstairs is a room with plenty of space, tables, sofas etc. Nice atmosphere – although a bit quiet and library like this time of the morning. Wifi wise I am currently connected to streetnet. I did notice a WEP protected network called BTP, with a much stronger signal than streetnet, but when I asked the staff for a password I was told to use streetnet, they didn’t admit that BTP might stand for Boston Tea Party, but I didn’t push it. Shame because for some reason the streetnet signal seems to vary and i’ve already had to reconnect once.

I won’t do any ratings because I need to try some other places first to compare it to, but it is definately a contender.

UPDATE: Actually, the streetnet connection in Boston Tea Party is very flaky – I wanted to correct my misspelling of “definately” in the last paragraph, but got booted out (of the wifi, not Boston Tea Party) for the third time. I’m now correcting this from work. The flakiness could possibly be because I was running over an ssh tunnel (too paranoid about transmitting my passwords on a public network), so I was authenticating in one browser, then using another web browser running through a web proxy on another browser, maybe it saw me as inactive and logged me off or something? Either way – park street cafe bars take notice – if you want my massive £2 a week business, get yourself some wifi for customer use 😉

what’s this? i’m actually blogging again after a break of about six months – new site, new URL and everything. I’m not going to explain everything in this post, i’ll save that for when I “offcially” launch rickhurst.co.uk

no i’m blogging today because I decided to drop in at caffe gusto up at the top of park street on my way to work to have a coffee and use the free wifi. goddam it’s hot, but with the latin music and sounds of the cafe and non-english accents downstairs it seems about right, for a minute here I could be in spain somewhere, rather than just round the corner from work where I shall shortly go and ascend our many, many stairs and stand in front of the fan sweating for a while!