Greg

Overdosing on coffee

Came to the realization that I have nine pounds of unopened coffee in the pantry at the moment.  This doesn't take into account the probably half to three-fourths of a pound from the open coffee in the fridge.  Am I worried that the coffee industry will be feeling the repercussions of hurricane Katrina for a while in the near-term and the prices will skyrocket?  No.

I've been ordering coffee from Community Coffee for a while now - it's a good coffee that's fairly cheap (~$5 a pound compared to Tully's or Starbucks that sells for ~$9/lb or ~$10/lb at the local grocery stores) and they ship directly to your door.  Regular as clockwork, every couple of months I get four pounds of coffee that appear as if by magic.  And remind me that I meant to cancel the order.  Not permanently cancel the standing order, just cancel it as a once off so that I can make a bigger dent in the stockpile.  Probably I should also reduce the amount I get to three pounds instead of four. 

If you happen to try out the community coffee, I order the Cafe Special and the Dark Roast (2 pounds of each) - and drink the Cafe Special before I drink the dark roast.  So really I have 3 pounds of Cafe Special and 6 pounds of dark roast waiting to be brewed.  If that gives you any pointers on what to try from them first :)

On a complete tangent, the coffee that I'm drinking at the moment is a really nice gift from the parents: Mayorga coffee roasters Jamaica Blue Mountain blend.  If you've never heard of it, Jamaica Blue Moutain the is the coffee equivalent of a 25-year old scotch.  Somebody who gives you this knows (or thinks) that you appreciate a nice cup of coffee and deserve to enjoy something special from time to time.

Random spurts of RSS feed from MSN My Spaces are driving me crazy

As I mentioned before I've started using RSS readers to keep track of a few sites, including some of my friends' blogs.  So far bloglines has held up pretty well, but I've noticed that a couple of the sites have started exhibitng a strange behavior in the last couple weeks.  All of which are MSN Spaces sites. 

They seem to have a random republishing of content.  Not all content to date though; sometimes it's older stuff that I've seen but not the newer stuff that I had recently read.  Sometimes it's the photo galleries.  Sometimes it's only the blog entries.  Sometimes it actually is all of the content from a certain date forward.  There doesn't seem to be a pattern except that it keeps happening and seems to be related to my spaces.  Why do I say that?  Messenger has the flower icon next to someone with a 'my space' to indicate they've updated it, and it keeps getting reset as well...  Which is more annoying then bloglines being tricked because i use messenger on 3 computers and so see the flower icon on each client that I use messenger.

Tacoma isn't nearly as bad as people make out. Really.

Looking for something to do on Sunday, Clodagh and I took a trip down to the Tacoma Museum of Glass.  Impressions from while we were down there:

• I expected a lot more art to be on display.  Not that I'm saying I wouldn't recommend going because it was small - it was cool and definitely I'd take visitors there.  Just that I expected larger galleries and more pieces on display.
• The "hot room" studio is really cool - this is where they have people making blown glass art in front of you and a dude on a mic talking you through the process.  Actually, while we were there, no one was blowing glass, they were just twirling hot glass to make a window pane for stained-glass windows.  I have a feeling this is the oragami equivalent of turning a dollar bill into a ring, but it was still cool.
• No photography is allowed inside the facility.  That's a bit disappointing since I'm on a photography kick these days.
• If you're going to this facility, choose a sunny day.  There's a bunch of exhibits on the 'bridge of glass' and it would have been more impactful if it hadn't been a gray day.  I think.
• There IS a bit of an aroma in Tacoma, but it's certainly not overwhelming.
• There's a decent brewpub up the street from the museum.  Not fantastic, but not something I'd try to avoid.  Wow, that's damning with faint praise if I've ever seen it.

After walking around the petite hip district, we continued on towards 'Old Town' Tacoma which felt a lot like a small town in New England. 

My photos from the visit are online here.

Back from Little Rock. With a little souvenir. Of sorts.

Just got back this weekend from visiting Mandy, Shawn, Avery and Dylan in Little Rock.  Along the flight back I realized that my head was starting to hurt and I was starting to feel all achey.  Given that the concert the night before was hours gone and I didn't wake up that way I was pretty sure it wasn't a hang-over ;-)  Unfortunately that means that I've been sick.  Out the last two days (first day feeling really bad, today feeling not as bad but not wanting to share the pleasure of the bug), I'm really looking forward to getting back to the office tomorrow - it's times like this that make me realize that I do enjoy my job and that there are a bunch of things that I want to get done.

Anyway, things that we did/saw in Little Rock (other than family, which I'd always recommend seeing :)):

Clinton Presidential Library: This was really interesting.  Probably less so if you completely hate Clinton like a portion of the country seems to.  Amongst the highlights were a replica of the cabinet room and a replica of the oval office.  Strangely, you couldn't actually go into the oval office and had to peer into it from a doorway.  As we kept saying when it came up - it's a REPLICA.  Not like if we destroyed something they couldn't replicate a new, well, replica of the real thing.  Which is safe and sound thousands of miles away.  But, I digress.  One of the other cool things was looking down the gallery of the library - it was inspired by the long room of library at Trinity College in Dublin (IRE, not OH).  You may have also heard about the long room with the controversy around the 'Jedi Archives' in Star Wars Episode II that was many thought were a clone.

Widespread Panic Concert: Saturday evening we saw the Widespread Panic show in Alltel Arena...  This was probably the best show I'd seen in the last couple years in terms of crowd being excited about/energetic with the band.  I've seen other shows that were really good, but usually there's pockets of the 'hard core' fan that is super excited and everyone else is just chilling out listening to music.  Widespread always puts on a good show and this was no exception.

I must be soooooo old

Had one of those random moments that helps you realize you're in a distinctly different stage of life than you were previously on Friday.  Mesh, Clodagh and I went to see Wallace and Gromit (very funny movie) at a theater in the U-district.  On the way back to the car these two drunk girls walked by and I overheard part of their conversation which went somethng like this:

Girl 1: "He was 21?  Really?"

Girl 2: "Yeah.  That's soooo old."

To which the three of us wondered - what does that make us?

Intro to RSS, or at least for me

If you're reading this blog then you've probably heard of RSS (my feed is here) and have an aggregator program that you use regularly.  Or, you're not using it because there's something that annoys you with how these programs generally work...  I've actually been ignoring the existance of RSS readers for a while simply due to inertia and have started using them for the last few weeks.  In a strangely timed coincidence, Aaron blogged looking for one that met his needs. 

At the time I suggested Pluck, but I've since moved off of it - there was something weird going on where if I had the refresher running my network would start getting very flaky.  Some pages wouldn't load with a DNS error, and if I refreshed a few times it would suddenly work again.  In the MTV-generation way, rather than try to debug it, I've ditched pluck and moved on to Aaron's recommended software - Bloglines.

So far so good, but here are my thoughts (since I've only been using readers for a few weeks).  If I right click on a link to the RSS feed, I should be able to just add it to my feeds I subscribe to in one go.  Or, if I actually navigate to that page and see the XML, I should have a one-click short-cut (or ctrl-<something>) that automatically adds it to my feeds.  It is annoying and makes me less likely to use the feed if I have to go load my newsreader->find the add button->copy & paste the URL->click save->etc.  Particularly since I don't leave the reader open at all times because I hate taskbar clutter and already have too many apps running anyway.  Probably these pages/readers do add something integrated/easy and I'm just missing it and need to dig more.

On a bit of a tangent, I've created a new category for posts - 'technology'.  This is going to be anything that is somewhat tech related that I post about.  Smartphone, RSS, security, any random program, computer problems i'm having, TiVo, etc.  Except I don't actually have a TiVo anymore, but you get the point.

[Edit 10/11/2005 11:21am]
Added the link in the "my feed is here".  Must not blog when coming down with cold :(

Exploring Seattle's summer haunts on a grey fall day

I spent a few hours today going around Seattle and taking some pictures (will add a link once I've uploaded a few of the good ones).  Today's exploration:

Madison Park: I've been here a couple times to the Attic pub to watch a game, but haven't really walked around here before...  Just another reminder that areas of the city are able to maintain their own feeling while being minutes from downtown.  It's what Clodagh would call "Madison Park village" since it has what's essentially a 'main street' with the shops and restaurants all leading down to the lake front.  Strangely, there's a couple of condo towers right along the water that really don't seem to belong at all.  But, I'd say the upper floors have an incredible view of downtown and the lake - just at the expense of their neighbors!  It's somewhere I would try to come this summer and sit outside at one of the bistros for a outdoor evening meal...

Madrona: OK, less Madrona and more Madrona park.  After continuing south from Madison Park, I eventually came to Madrona Park beach - more of a grassy area to hang out then a beach, though there is a bit of sand there as well.  And a concession stand housing 'Mama Williebells' BBQ.  And a dance studio.  No, don't ask why there's randomly a dance studio in a park.  It makes no sense to me either...

I also drove by Leschi, but was heading out by then so didn't have a chance to stop and wander around.  Definitely will come back and check it out in the near future - even if I have a feeling it's meant to be visited during summer, not the grey days of fall.

A general comment on Lake Washington Blvd heading south from 520 towards I-90 - holy crap are those houses nice.  You need to have some serious money to buy in that area - a number of them looked like anything between what I would call a 'villa' to a 'compound'.  As in "the <insert rich dynastic family> will be hosting the summer gala at their compound."  Yes, there are also some normal houses too, but they seem much fewer and far between.  Weirdly, there are sections of public shorefront and parks around there.  I got a couple cool pictures from the tiny 'Denny Blaine Park', and tried to drop by another shorefront 1/2 mile down the road.  Unfortunately there literally was no parking around the stairway entrance, as was I driving down what looked like a private lane to get there.  Strange stuff.

Unrelated to any of this, there is a strange bug with community server that I can't figure out.  From my home computer I can edit in 'design' or 'html' mode (design mode is like a stripped down version of wordpad).  From other computers I'm in perpetual 'html' edit mode which is a real pain.  Must investigate soon - probably it's some setting or config that I haven't tweaked properly...