A wireless love affair

Dear Starbucks — I love you.

Although I’m a regular coffee fiend (I once knocked on the door of the coffee shop at 6 a.m. because they hadn’t unlocked their doors yet and I had to be at school, but I wasn’t going without coffee in hand), I’m even more enamoured lately with their free wifi.

Because Shaw has a habit of literally cutting wires when old clients move out of residences, I’m without Internet until the middle of July, when a Telus technician can come out to the middle of nowhere to hook it back up (my dad thinks they might be sent out of Edmonton, which is why I have to wait until the middle of July).

I can still check Twitter and Facebook on my iPhone, as well as Google anything that needs immediate attention (like when my mother texted me to find out where a Petro-Canada gas station was in Nisku, Alta.), but there’s only so much browsing you can do on a screen that’s yay big. And I obviously can’t do certain things like read a Flash-powered newspaper website, and opening .pdfs seems to be touch and go. I’m not complaining – I don’t want to think about the state I’d be in without my smartphone, period – but I still wouldn’t mind being able to sit down after dinner and stream an episode of Grey’s Anatomy or The Big Bang Theory.

But the first things I checked out when I logged on to the Starbucks network last Saturday night? I admit, Facebook was one of the first URLs I typed in, but that was quickly hidden by other tabs, including these ones.

Son of Bold Venture - the blog of an Esquire magazine writer
Magazine Awards - hoping to download some good offline features reading
After Deadline - my inner copy editing geek is in love with this blog, which I found accidentally through this post.
The 6th floor - found because I was poking around the After Deadline site.
Brain Album - I haven’t spent as much time on this blog as I would like to. It’s the blog of a former Edmonton Journal editor, and it shows up on my Twitter periodically as she posts new items and tweets about it.
Meanest Mom - a blog I stumbled on and I keep coming back to, for inexplicable reasons
Read It Later - hoping to figure out the intricacies of the app. I’m still struggling with being able to access my lists offline. Also, creating my lists still isn’t as easy as I would hope – I have to figure out if there’s a way to “read it later” in TweetDeck, the main Twitter application I use. Because right now, my options in TweetDeck are to favourite the item, then later move it over to Read It Later when I’m on my phone or web browser.
Globe and Mail - I love the Facts and Arguments essays (most of them). Was trying to find something I'd read before, so didn't stick around for long.

I also Googled some magazine layout stuff, as someone made a comment to me that the newspapers in Europe have quite a different design style than their North American counterparts, which I’m now curious to explore.
This is one of the sites that came back as a hit and some of the links look interesting as well.

The sad point I’m trying to make, is I think I’ve crossed the geek line. I mean, who seeks out stuff that is basically work-related, when they haven’t had open Internet for nearly a week? Don’t people have better things to do like read FML and play Farmville?

Not me, apparently.