I'm sitting in Ben's Cafe in hip, trendy Takadanobaba. I come by often now that I'm self-employed and enjoy a certain geographic freedom when it comes to work. And in some ways Ben's is as much an office as anywhere else. There's a LAN with a connection to the Internet. The coffee isn't free, but it's better than that available in most coffee houses, much less your typical office. On top of that, the music is good and there's not a cubicle divider in the whole place!

Seattle has about 30 of these places. Far as I can tell, Tokyo has one. Figure that out.

Today I was surprised to find three notebook computers--with users attached--occupying the corner of the room into which I was hoping to slide. It's the only non-smoking area in the place, which is important here because people tend to smoke non-stop once they settle in. I glance around the room hoping to locate an open space but find none. I decide to squeeze on in there among the other tech weenies, and ask one of the fellows seated there if there's a network port open on the hub behind him. He checks and nods. I go fetch a cable and he hooks me up.

I connect the other end to my notebook, boot up and prepare to get into my bi-annual web site update when they start in.

Damn. Linux geeks. I should have realized right away from the shoes. One of them must have stolen a glance at my display and noticed that I'm running NT, because they start talking even louder now, trying hard to inject as much Linux-specific jargon into their speech as possible. I know what they're really trying to say with all this developer-ese. "You there! Gates-boy! User! Stand back and behold the power of Linux, deftly manipulated by we hardy codemasters! Ha!"

Linux geeks are generally cool except for their frequent and tiresome habit of flashing their hacker colors at whomever happens to be nearby, particularly if they smell MS on you. I mean, I can dig the whole Open Source vibe and everything, even the occasionally vitriolic Micro$oft Must Die sentiment that often wafts in with it, but that's as far as it goes for me.

"Next I'm gonna try to move a file onto my PalmPilot!," gushes one of them, spittle peppering his display. This seems to me not unlike vowing to write a Java-based numeric pager emulator for a 3G mobile phone. Fun as a programming exercise, perhaps, but otherwise clearly in the domain of Why Bother.

Anyway.

I didn't come here to write about that. I came to write about Saturday. Find it in a brand new Communique.