Baby on the brain

cwest on 2002-03-02T17:04:35

Where have I been the last few weeks? Baby land. I love her to death, she is wonderfull but man is she demanding. Babies seem to have about three noticable instincts: Cry when something is wrong, suck when somethings in your mouth, and you have to have it NOW.

Our baby is suprisingly calm, she doesn't cry much and she is very content. But every now and again she has the dreaded gas through the night. This is where your baby is in a ton of pain and all you can do is hold her while she screams. I haven't had much sleep these last few nights.

On other fronts, I want to start a business. An Internet Cafe that fills several holes in my local and surrounding community: Coffee Shop, Broadband Internet, (good) live local music, and a cool place to just hang out. Oh, and the Playstation, Xbox and Game cube I have in mind will help too.

I'm not looking to get rich with this, my main drive is the cool place to hang out. My second drive is to pay my bills while having a blast. My third is that with the right staff, I can pretty much play all day. Well, that's how the dream goes at least. I'm sure reality is way off that mark.

All that said, I also want to see how the public would react to Linux Desktops. Can I create an experience close enough to windows to be usable and branded well enough for me to be hip.... we shall see. First, researching wether anyone want s a place like this.

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Three Familiar Instincts

chromatic on 2002-03-02T17:34:15

I don't need kids, I've got USERS.

Linux Cafe?

ziggy on 2002-03-02T19:08:42

I'm not familiar with the area where you want to build a hangout. I haven't tended to use net cafes over the years, but when we were recently on vacation, they came in quite handy.

Most of the time, all I really want is ssh, and maybe a recent stock build of Perl. But I'm not most people, and most people want some well-rendering browser, instant messaging and Word or PowerPoint.

It'd be great if you could set up the kind of email garden linux cluster that finds itself transported between tech shows. But I don't know how meaningful an all-Linux shop would be if that would necessarily ban Word and PowerPoint. I really hope it does work though.

Linux Internet Cafes...

kamileon on 2002-03-02T21:46:29

I had a friend set up an internet kiosk for a coffee shop in Idaho a couple years ago, running Linux... It seemed to work out quite well. People really aren't that picky about their OS when it's not their computer, as long as it's got pretty buttons to click on. He did his own custom GUI with only a few buttons, one for mail, one for web browser, etc. This was probably a good 5-6 years ago, so a lot of the customers weren't as savvy, but I think the principle still holds. Present them with a bare minimum of options they are going to want, presented in a easy to understand fashion GUI fashion, and they will be happy with Windows, or Linux, or Macs, or OS/2.

I've never been in an Internet Cafe but...

djberg96 on 2002-03-02T22:34:20

Consider using thin clients. Much less hardware to deal with. Less noise, too. If you use Sunrays, you could sell them a session card so that if/when they return, they can start right where they left off - and on any of the clients, not just the one they last worked on.

As for the XBox thing - well, I think that will draw in the kids who will never leave. You'll probably end up putting time limits on the machine. That's assuming you'll want kids in there at all.

Actually, this is giving me ideas as well. :)

Western PA area

lachoy on 2002-03-04T15:09:10

I wonder whether many areas of Pittsburgh are ready for an internet cafe? I can think of a few -- South Side, Oakland, maybe Squirrel Hill -- that have the foot traffic and walking-distance residential density to support one. But other than that... I'm not sure. I'm not an expert on Western PA demographics, but I think the population skews quite old to support something like this unless it's focused on where there are concentrations of younger people. OTOH, the outlay isn't really that great in the big scheme of things and it's an operation that can scale really easily, just by adding more terminals :-)