Good Hacker Cities
jdavid: Milwaukee!It's a laidback city between Madison, WI (super liberal) and Chicago ( liberal ), and Milwaukee is a nice mix in between, which i would label progressive.Milwaukee has a great place called http://bucketworks.org which is a "fitness club for the brain," but to those of you that know about CoWorking, Petcha Kutcha, and http://BarcampMilwaukee.com, you will find http://bucketworks.org to be your second home.  Its a shared technology and art space where all of the MKE hackers and innovators hangout and mix things up.WE-Energies allows You to choose to buy renewable only energy for a higher price. ($.12KWh vs $.07KWh)  There are co-op gocers, and the city is really walkable and buss-able.Good cheep and hip places to live in Milwaukee are Menomenoy Valley, 5th Ward, Bayview, Riverwest, where you can rent a room for $400-$700 a month.There are a ton of microbreweries, and if you know the difference between pasteurized filtered macros, and unpasteurized unfiltered micros, you will love Milwaukee.  There are a few great places to visit like Centraal, Transfer, and Palm Tavern.  On Friday at 4pm go to Lakefront Brewery for a brewery tour, fish fry and polka.  In the sumer every ethnicity is celebrated, each with their own festival.  There is always something to do.  The new thing in MKE is to have over 300 beers to choose from, YES I SAID 300, so you can sample just about any bier in the world.Most of Milwaukee is bussable, bikeable, or walkable.  The city has Bike Holidays and is considering buying 700 bikes that could be rented to go between any two bike racks.Its also one of the few areas in the US that has school vouchers so your kids can go anywhere.The cafe's are AWESOME, every cafe has wifi, although many use WEBBeams so you get 2 hours free with your coffee, or for 20-30$ a month you get unlimited access at any cafe.  You can totally avoid any coffee chains in Milwaukee, we have SO MANY INDEPENDENT COFFEE shops its great.  We even have one on the lake.  Much of the coffee in Milwaukee is from Altera, and is fair trade.Since I was there for 10 years, I put a lot of Time into building the tech culture.  I can introduce to almost anyone you might need to grow your business/ code base in Milwaukee.We have an active investment community.http://wistechnology.com/http://www.wisconsintechnologycouncil.com/http://goldenangels.angelgroups.net/http://www.siliconpastures.com/http://www.kegonsapartners.com/http://govsbizplancontest.com/Check out http://urbanmilwaukee.com/ for more info.If you want to get connected to people in milwaukee just email me:
jdavid.net@gmail.comI have heard that if you like SF or Seattle you would like Milwaukee, and if you need a metropolis every now and then, Chicago is a 2hour train ride away.