But that was then and this is now and these days a lot of software gets written in Starbucks, where marketing is only a table with three suits away; those yobbos never shut up.

But, there's a certain dark aspect to this: ever pay for a round of Frappa-whatsis for your daughters and their friends? I've bought cars for less. Also "the largest Java Chip Frappuccino weighs in at 650 calories - 50 calories more than a Big Mac - and contains 25 grams of fat, compared with 33 grams for the Big Mac."

So, if you're gonna hang out for a long time in Starbucks watching code not write itself you're gonna have to get a handle on the financials. It is possible to drink coffee or tea, all day for peanuts. But there are some tricks.

Coffee
First of all we have to dispel the "Starbucks is expensive" myth. Sure, if you're a complete douche and order a double decaf dry soy light latte extra skinny no foam then 1) you'll pay $5 this "drink" and 2) I'll hate standing behind you in line while I'm waiting to say "small coffee?". I sometimes go completely berserk and say "small coffee please? bold" and if they dare give me that venti-asti-spumanti question I glare and point to the small cup in the small-medium-large stack they have right there, one would assume, for this purpose alone. Why they had to invent a new branch of linguistics for the taxonomy of paper beverage containers we will perhaps never know, what we do know is its progenitor should be taken out, drawn and quartered in the public square at dawn.

Now, a Starbucks 'small' is the same amount of coffee as a Tim Horton's 'large'. And it's 3 cents cheaper. So right there you're saving money by gong to Starbucks, and the coffee is better and the poeple less likely to be mutant aliens.

So, TIP #1: order coffee. Don't be fancy. Make it snappy.

Now, granted, saving 3 cents is nothing to write home about, although there is a certain satisfaction in getting better coffee for the same price. It's a value for money thing. But, and here it comes, TIP #2 get a Starbucks card, and use it.

If you're developing software you probably know already you get 2 free hours of wifi if you have a Starbucks card (and you can have multiple cards) but if you bothered to read the fine print you might have noticed that you get a free refill of that coffee if you paid for it with a card. So now you got two coffees for $1.76, and are getting better coffee for half the price of that Horton's swill.

Tea
Credit for this goes to a certain friendly barista who seemed annoyed I was spending so much money there and offered TIP #3"you know if you get a medium tea, with two teabags, one on the side, it's the cheapest way to get tea" and she's not kidding. They only charge you fifty cents for an extra teabag, but in stores they're $12 for 10, over a buck each. This way you're getting two cups of tea for $2.31. And I have to say it really isn't bad tea at all. If you're really trying to be frugal just get the small. Hot beverage freakenomics prevail: you actually get more coffee when you pay for more coffee, you only get more free water when you pay for more expensive and progressively larger sizes of tea, but you get the same amount of actual tea with every size. You're paying for water again.

Iced Coffee
Summers and iced coffee go together like, well, summers and iced coffee. My daughters and I really bonded one summer to repeated calls of "Dad, let's get an ice-cap" and off we'd trundle to Tim Horton's for an iced cappuccino. Which really has nothing to do with either ice or cappuccino, it's really a sugar slushie with coffee flavouring. And it's nearly four bucks.

Now, Starbucks has an equivalent of these, their frappa-whatsis things. They're five bucks. The girls say yeah, they're better. I can't say I like them, I like iced coffee.

Now, Starbucks will sell you all manner of iced coffee but the cheapest one isn't even on their menu, it's so simple it's not worth listing: TIP #3 a shot of espresso in a glass of ice. $1.73. The glass of ice is free.

You have options here. You can dump the espresso over the ice, swish it around a bit and drink an iced espresso and for fifty cents less than what Starbucks charges for an "Americano" aptly named, is a shot of espresso over ice, with *water*. That's right you avoid the fifty cent charge for *water*, ostensibly free and with no nutritive value, and can instead pour in milk or cream, expensive for them, free for you and with substantive nutrient value.

If you really want to go nuts, instead of ordering a shot of espresso *in* a glass of ice, you can order a shot of espresso *and* a glass of ice.

Then you take your paper cup with the espresso and the plastic cup with the ice over to the condiment stand and dump a bunch of honey you'll find there into the coffee. Next add a healthy amount of chocolate powder (be aware, it's cocoa and icing sugar, I watched them make it), cinnamon and nutmeg and stir with one of those wooden stirry things quite well until there is no texture left. Now pour whole milk over the glass of ice then dump the espresso sludge on top. Stirring is optional. It's good, real good, and it's $1.73.