A nice place to visit, but can you live without Usenet?

The Roasterie Cafe
6223 Brookside Boulevard (southeast corner of 62nd Terrace and Brookside), Kansas City

802.11g
SSID: Cafe

I'd wanted to try this one ever since the buzz about it started, so needing refreshment in the aftermath of the Brookside St. Patrick's Day warm-up parade gave me my chance. It's been described as laptop-friendly, but I think that's a relative term. If the place isn't crowded you shouldn't have trouble getting a table next to the wall and a power outlet, but there don't seem to be an awful lot of them. Although I connected at only 36 Mbps for some reason and then for some other reason saw that speed drop to 24, it's still way faster than whatever backhaul they're using, so there's no effect on performance.

There's only one minor quibble, one that probably won't matter to the majority of today's Internet users, especially younger ones. For some reason, port 119, the NNTP or Usenet news port, appears to be blocked. Yes, Usenet has been largely supplanted by Web-based discussion resources, and it still carries a stigma in some people's minds as a rather unsavory place, although there never really was that much smut on it, at least compared to everything else, if you ask me. And certainly there's more dirty stuff on the Web now than there'd be available through what still is largely a text-based means of communication. Anyway, I'm mentioning this just in case it's a concern.

Oh, one more thing. Watch out for what appears to be a residential network whose owner hasn't even bothered to change the default SSID on their router, let alone set up their encryption. Methinks they shall come to regret that...