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Starbucks – Free wifi should not cost £5

Today, I went to London to visit a prospect customer – who we’ve done work for before – oddly the people I spoke to had no knowledge of the work we did (they paid for it all about 18-24 months ago… but nevermind), and it doesn’t appear to have been deployed either (“We heard someone talking about this X months ago; but thought it was just a suggestion / didn’t think work had been done”) … so I’ve probably thrown a spanner into their idea of migrating from ExponentCMS to something else (E.g. Drupal).

Anyway, I got back to Birmingham at about 17:00ish, at which point there wasn’t a lot of point in me sitting on the bus for an hour or more, only to arrive in Bromsgrove, and then drive back to Birmingham to do the phpwm meeting tonight…

So, while walking up New Street, I spot Starbucks with it’s “Free WIFI” advert in the window. Cool. Drink + Wifi = Win. Or not. I had to spend £5 to buy a ‘starbucks reward card’ – then use my iPhone to find out how to register (which wifi ssid etc) – and the starbucks.co.uk site didn’t make it obvious to find either.

So, suffice to say, now I am connected – and all traffic is being tunnelled out via

ssh -D 9999 david@my.server

<expletive begins-with=’f’ ends-with=’wits’/>