Rob's Blog

The Vagrant life of a Web Developer
Oct 19th 2006 19:10

This week I have mostly been working from Brighton, London, Somerset and my car. It's been a funny sort of a nomadic week like that.

I spent Monday night at Sam&Lisa's, and Tuesday night and Julian&Margaretta's. Both excellent choices of accommodation. The Sam&Lisa branch of Hotel Brighton provided reading material, and a remarkably comfortable double bed. The Julian&Margaretta branch of Hotel Brighton provided a camp bed shared with an excitable kitten, however the food was truly excellent and the morning espresso was a stunning touch of class. Both venues provided free WiFi connection, however only at hotel Julian&Margaretta was there Karaoke in the evening.

My full working day in Brighton went a little like this (I know you're all terribly interested in what I actually do for a living).

• Started the day with a business meeting in Starbuck's
• Picked up some Sushi from M&S and sat on the beach
• Sent a few emails courtesy of the free Pier2Pier network
• It started to rain, so I retreated to the Fortune of War. The WiFi still worked there, worked on a website for a while. No coffee, so I had a lunchtime pint.
• Got a lot of work done, but it got a bit cold.
• Retreated the Great Eastern. Had a coffee there, but it was truly poor. So followed it with a pint of HSB.
• Wrote some very technical stuff and pondered some ideas
• My laptop battery was low, and the Great Eastern had no WiFi so on I went.
• The Hare and Hound provided both free WiFi and a charging socket
• Had a couple of cokes there, and another bad coffee.

My conclusions are:

• Pubs do crap coffee
• Free wireless Internet is brilliant

In truly sad news, I only heard yesterday that Arif Khan who I used to work with at Babel has tragically died. We started at the same time, and shared a hotel room in Aber on my first ever hit squad for a couple of weeks.  My heartfelt sympathy goes to Arif's friends and family. Whatever went wrong, he was a good egg.