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The first startup where I worked, it was just me and the founder, and we were always working from a Starbucks with two laptops as a way to save money on the off

The first startup where I worked, it was just me and the founder, and we were always working from a Starbucks with two laptops as a way to save money on the office and also to allow for change of scenery (this was Manhattan, and there were something like 60 Starbucks here at the time) It worked great for 3 months. After Thanksgiving all the stores started to play the same Christmas Tunes CD on repeat - nothing kills concentration quite as badly as hearing "Jingle Bells" for the sixth time in a day. (headphones only mildly alleviated the problem)

briancooley 18y ago
$100 spent on Shure earbuds can solve the Christmas music problem. They are essentially earplugs. I can't hear a thing but my iPod when I'm using mine.
- rms 18y ago
  I have these ones myself... http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0007WZLDC/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0007WZLDC/
gtani 18y ago
the most disturbing thing on starbuck's playlist last year was the Carol King live album. I wanted to kill myself when they started playing it every hour. The alternatives, if you still have Tmobile wireless, are - Fedex Kinko's, harsh lighting coupled with excessive air conditioning, and who knows what kind of fumes you're inhaling? - Borders bookstores are more like it, if you need ot look up K&R, gang of 4, whatever, there it is. BUt the wireless routers have limited range.
- icky 18y ago
  > - Borders bookstores are more like it, if you need ot look up K&R, gang of 4, whatever, there it is. BUt the wireless routers have limited range. That's when you chip in with your friends/coworkers, get one wireless account (assuming you all go to the same store on a reasonably fixed schedule), and bring in some dd-wrt/openwrt/tomato routers (with all but one of them in bridge-mode), and have the master router set up with WPA2 on your side and either OpenVPN at the router level, or just use whatever external SSH boxes you've got as SOCKS proxies. (If you care, remember that Firefox doesn't proxy DNS requests over SOCKS unless you set the about:config item network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true). Also don't forget to bring power strips, since you're bringing in more hardware.
klocksib 18y ago
I'm assuming it wasn't even classic Jingle Bells. How long did you listen to Jingle Bell Rock before you threw your Coffee at the barista and jumped out the window?
parenthesis 18y ago
Put this on instead: http://www.brentlewis.com/cd9.htm http://www.brentlewis.com/cd9.htm .

briancooley 18y ago

$100 spent on Shure earbuds can solve the Christmas music problem. They are essentially earplugs. I can't hear a thing but my iPod when I'm using mine.

rms 18y ago
I have these ones myself... http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0007WZLDC/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0007WZLDC/

gtani 18y ago

the most disturbing thing on starbuck's playlist last year was the Carol King live album. I wanted to kill myself when they started playing it every hour. The alternatives, if you still have Tmobile wireless, are - Fedex Kinko's, harsh lighting coupled with excessive air conditioning, and who knows what kind of fumes you're inhaling? - Borders bookstores are more like it, if you need ot look up K&R, gang of 4, whatever, there it is. BUt the wireless routers have limited range.

icky 18y ago
> - Borders bookstores are more like it, if you need ot look up K&R, gang of 4, whatever, there it is. BUt the wireless routers have limited range. That's when you chip in with your friends/coworkers, get one wireless account (assuming you all go to the same store on a reasonably fixed schedule), and bring in some dd-wrt/openwrt/tomato routers (with all but one of them in bridge-mode), and have the master router set up with WPA2 on your side and either OpenVPN at the router level, or just use whatever external SSH boxes you've got as SOCKS proxies. (If you care, remember that Firefox doesn't proxy DNS requests over SOCKS unless you set the about:config item network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true). Also don't forget to bring power strips, since you're bringing in more hardware.

klocksib 18y ago

I'm assuming it wasn't even classic Jingle Bells. How long did you listen to Jingle Bell Rock before you threw your Coffee at the barista and jumped out the window?

parenthesis 18y ago

Put this on instead: http://www.brentlewis.com/cd9.htm http://www.brentlewis.com/cd9.htm .