Coffee Shop Wireless

As someone who works primarily on the internet, I often find myself going to coffee shops that offer wireless to get out of the house. While I wish that more coffee shops offered free wireless internet (those that do get my business more than they would otherwise!), I sometimes find myself paying for wireless internet.

This typically works as follows: while connected to that wireless access point, you can access only a handful of pages, until you create an account and pay on one of those pages. After you've paid, you have access to the entire internet.

Like most online services, these wireless subscriptions have an option for you to generate a new password if you've forgotten yours. But there's a Catch-22 -- they email you your new password, and you can't access your email until you've logged in... with your new password.

You'd think they'd have realized this issue and come up with a different solution, like a secret question, to allow you to reset your password without checking your email -- it's not like this is the highest-security application on the web. Meanwhile, I've learned from some frustrating times and am now storing these username/password combinations in text files on my laptop.