Coffee shops and the digital nomad (or, man without an office haunts local java huts)

I've worked out of my home for the past 16 years. This means that for almost two decades I've had an established space in whatever apartment or home I happened to live in that was set aside for me and my work debris. My latest space was in my basement - - for the past seven years; time enough to accumulate quite a bit of "stuff" and the urge to purge.

The June floods took care of that; everything in my office was lost except for my computer and hard drives - - a virtual "reset" button.

A digression: My friend Doug owns a dump truck (which is pictured at right; and, yes, my stuff filled the dump truck and the dumpster seen in the picture, plus another dumpster). He was nice enough to bring it over so we could fill it with the accumulated debris of my career-to-now. When he returned from his trip to the dump, Doug walked over to me where I stood. I was exhausted and probably looked like a man who needed an encouraging word.

After a beat, Doug said; "On the bright side, your stuff slid out really good at the dump. No snags or nothing."

As I buy replacement stuff, I confess that my purchasing decisions are ever-so-slightly swayed by whether the item will "slide out nice" if disaster strikes again...

Anyhoo, with my basement now a bare-to-the-walls construction site, I have to get out of the house to work. My desktop Mac is in my bedroom now, but there's just no way to work there while the kids are on Summer break. So, being a two-Mac sort of guy, I get out with my laptop and do the digital nomad shuffle, camping at coffee shops and bookstores.

After over two months of being a cafe hobo, I've become quite discerning in what spots are most conducive to productivity. That's why I read with interest Greg Kowalski's speculation that 5-Star Coffee might be closing (not confirmed. 4/25/UPDATE: The employees on duty this morning report that the owner has assured them "not to worry about anything." Is that comforting when 5star.pdf is online?).

I'm a guy who tries to support local businesses when given a choice, but as I noted mere days before the flood, Starbucks made itself very attractive by offering free Wi-Fi at their locations after years partnering with T-Mobile for goofy pay Wi-Fi. Just get and register a Starbucks Card and you get Wi-Fi (plus free syrup shots or something; I just get black coffee so I'm not up on all that).

Here's a meta-moment: a shot of my little digital hobo camp as this very second as I compose this post:

5-Star offers free Wi-Fi as well - - so why don't I always go there? Turns out that, in addition to my desire to "mix it up,"  there are a great many subtle features that make one coffee shop or book store cafe better than another on a given day. I'll list them here in Part II - - but, right now, I really have to do real work; I have a basement reconstruction to pay for, you know.