This morning I had a fantastic coffee but frustratingly slow wifi experience in Boston Tea Party, connected via street net – it went from fast to slow to standstill, although the signal was fine. Someone downloading a series of 24 across the road in starbucks maybe?
I was trying to get rid of the google ads on this site – i’m getting over a thousand page hits a month but have only earned myself $8 since I added them months ago – I can’t even cash that in until i’ve earned $100 so it’s just not worth selling my soul for…
Today I find myself in Caffe Nero on the triangle. I’d always discounted it before because I didn’t realise it had an upstairs bit and I didn’t like the idea of using my laptop downstairs with people queing for coffee looking over my shoulder. I’m presented with three possible wifi connections – StreetNet, SurfandSip and Caffe Gusto next door. I couldn’t get connected to surfandsip (and I think it’s a paid service anyway?), Streetnet seems a reasonable signal, and Caffe Gusto is weak but useable (a bit cheeky too considering, but it’s nice not to have to fill out the survey that you do with StreetNet)
I went back to Boston Tea Party today, mainly because i wanted to try Goldbrick House, but it wasn’t open at 8.30am (I checked back later, it opens at 9 – a bit late for pre-work coffee. The girl in there said she thought they had wifi for customer use – not sure whether it was streetnet or their own).
Anyway, I decided to see how reliable StreetNet is if I threw caution to the wind and didn’t tunnel everything through ssh. Seems it’s fine – maybe I confused it before by validating normally, then reverting back to ssh tunnelling..
It’s back on my list – nice latte, nice Ikea Poang chair to sit in upstairs by the window 🙂
As I mentioned before a few of us from netsight are going to Plone Conference 2006 in Seattle. Besides actually attending the conference i’ve been reading up on other things to check out while i’m there. I plan to visit a few of these coffee shops with wifi and i’ve also just read that the blog business summit is also on at the same time – maybe there could be a bit of cross-fertilisation there as many of the plone bloggers will be at Plone conf?
at this rate i’m going to find it very difficult to review anywhere else 😉
this is the internet equivalent of trying to organise my CD collection – wait- that’s not too difficult, i’m giving most of my cd’s to a charity shop as I prefer digital only these days. I think my “readers” are getting a bit confused when I jump between posts about coffee and posts about geekery. no. those two go together perfectly. Anyway, i’m going to add some categories, and try to retro-categorise some of the old posts over time. RSS subscribers may see old posts reappaer for a few days/weeks/months/years
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!
Dave Irwin 2006-09-07 18:57:09
Rick 2006-09-07 19:19:51