I’m resuming my practice of blogging in place — visiting [third] places and blogging about them while there. I’d actually taken some notes at some earlier places, following my initial foray to Cafe Solstice way back in February, and may post those retroactively (retrospectively?). Today, I’m sitting on the porch at Fremont Cafe (in the chair pictured on the right in the photo on their homepage), drinking a cup of Roaster’s Blend from Lighthouse Roasters (another coffeehouse I want to visit soon), listening to KEXP 90.3 FM (which the barista, Precious, explains is a truly independent, eclectic, and commercial-free radio station that she often tunes in to while working the morning shift) and enjoying the people and atmosphere here on a cool, sunny morning.
This is my second visit, and I again see the man who does the New York Times crossword puzzle (a syndicated version of which is carried daily in The Seattle Times) here every morning. Last time, we got to talking about crossword puzzles, how the NYTimes puzzle gets progressively more challenging throughout the week (from Monday thru Saturday; apparently, the Sunday puzzle is larger, but less difficult, than the Saturday puzzle … he is working on yesterday’s [Sunday] puzzle — which I suppose is really last Sunday’s — today, so I’m leaving him alone this visit), and how the Wall Street Journal weekly puzzle is just right for me (with respect to both frequency of publication and level of challenge). Last visit, we talked about how frustrated we both feel when we want to do a crossword puzzle on an airline in-flight magazine that has already been started — often with errors (I believe the term “contaminated” came up) — by someone else, and the general challenge of “sharing” a crossword puzzle, which tends to work best (for him and me, at least ) as a solitary activity.
After my last visit, I discovered that the coffeehouse has a webcam, but it is only highlighted on the web site — it is visible, but not highlighted, in the coffeehouse itself. This doesn’t particularly bother me, but I know others with more heightened sensitivities with respect to privacy that may be bothered. I can imagine an opt-in variation where the camera is used to take photos of people as they are ordering, and each person is presented with the choice of whether to add their photo to a collection of “friends (& patrons) of Fremont Coffee” that could be shown on the web site and/or on a large plasma display in the coffeehouse itself. Of course, I’m always seeing new possibilities for [proactive] displays :-).