Category Archives: Culture

Coffee Counter-Intuitive

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It’s true that I have been on and off the caffeine train in the last little while, but caffeine or not, I still enjoy coffee quite a bit.

Starbucks is my latest vice, and I love it dearly.  Yes, it’s stupid to pay over 2 bucks for a cup of coffee, but it’s just so darn good.  I’ve become a snob about it all it seems, since even a Tim Horton’s double double is a second rate cup now, barely worth crossing the street for.  I sincerely mean that, since there’s a Tim’s equally as close as the Starbucks at work, and I never go there.  The coffee is one thing, but I have come to appreciate the fact that you get to dress your own coffee to your taste at Starbucks.  Yes, I know you can dress your own at Tim Horton’s too, but at Starbucks you get real cream out of a thermos so it’s fresh, unlike the petro-creamers you get at Tim’s if you want to adjust it yourself. I’m here for a coffee break from work, not in the middle of a 12-hour road trip on the 401, snarfing down Cheetos, coffee and coke…

Secondly, the arbitrary amounts of cream and sugar you get at Tim’s have been enough to bother the crap out of me at times.  When you order a large coffee and get it “double double” you would expect it to taste the same all of the time.  When you order a small coffee and order it “double double” I mean that I want it to taste the same as the large, I don’t want to have to decide just how much smaller that cup is than the large, and then adjust my order accordingly.  I just want less coffee that tastes the same.  Which has long been my argument; “double double” is a flavour, not a recipe.  Much like “chocolate” or “vanilla” is a flavour “double double” is the way I like my coffee to taste, no matter the size of the vessel it is served in.

Despite my Tim Horton’s issues, Starbucks is not without it’s flaws.  I already mentioned the cost, but another problem I have is the puzzling decision to not brew decaf coffee in the afternoon.  Why?  Caffeine is certainly needed in the morning, if you are drinking coffee you would want it then for sure.  But once you are wired for sound and your eyelashes are quivering with each stray air current, you really don’t need any more caffeine, or at least I don’t.

So there you go, a coffee-flavoured rant about absolutely nothing important.  More’s the pity if you read even this far….  If you did, does anyone agree with me?  Any Tim Horton’s ordering strategies to share?

Signal Test

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There have been no blog posts here.  I blame work for being just too work-y.  No apologies, just more of a transmission test.

In keeping with my last post about what the Internet is for, it most definitely is for pictures of cats.  I don’t know why, it just is, even if I don’t really subscribe to that myself.

Here is Satan’s cat, if he ever had one.  Be sure to check out the slideshow and video there, that’s one butt-ugly cat.

Alternatively, this rat is Pixar-cute and if you spend enough time on the Internet you know that’s how things work.  That’s what the Internet can do, it can find you a rat that is 10x cuter than a given cat.

That will be all for today.  Real blog posts will resume at some point I assure you, dear reader.

Dwarfed Punk

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If you have never seen this, you haven’t been on the Internet very long, I bet your CAPS LOCK IS STILL ON.  Do us all a favour and watch this first.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl6RJyZdBSU&feature=related

Now that you are slightly up to speed, understand that there is no good reason for that video to exist.  It just does, it’s awesome, and that’s all there is to it.  It’s also safe to say that the Internet is very good at amplifying things that are strange.

For instance…

That’s still pretty good stuff, lots of practice there too.  Then we get something like this, and it transcends awesome and moves right on into art all by itself.  This is some pretty fine editing folks.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaDAiv0cYU4
I can only imagine how much time that actually took to do.  There you go.  Now you can take your CAPS LOCK OFF, get on Twitter, and pretend you know all about the Internets.

Twitter Gets Even Weirder

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Well, it seems that the world of Twitter just got slightly stranger as Geordie LaForge (also known as LeVar Burton, his real name) from Star Trek decided to use Twitter to plan an impromptu meetup with some of his Twitter followers in Toronto.  He tweeted that he was looking for a pub in Toronto to go to for a beer after an interview on CBC’s The Hour.  He got some suggestions, and then he said, ok I will be at this one in 45 minutes, meet me there for a beer.  And some people actually did.  By all accounts it was a rather awkward meeting, since no-one knew anyone else, and the folks that could actually get there were only mostly casual fans, not his typical hard-core Trek fans.  Still, this shows that Twitter allows a previously impossible level of immediacy to this sort of thing.  It really would be a dream for a marketer to say to the followers of a strong brand “Be in the market at the corner of George in 20 minutes for some free ice cream”.  Some folks would probably show, if they were interested, and if the story was compelling enough.

It’s a strange, twittery world out there people.  You should get involved, it’s still new enough to be fun, and it’s definitely new enough to be changing things as it goes along.

Smittens

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As Valentine’s Day approaches the web turns mushy and gooey with the love-related posts.  So when I saw this on Boing Boing, it seemed a natural to grab and re-post here. It’s a link to a knitting pattern so you can knit your own lover’s mitten, which was cleverly called the Smitten(tm).  Brilliant, thought I, let’s use this and actually post some frigging blog content already.

smittens

Steal the picture, add some clever words: bingo, a blog post. That would have been the end of it, except that the more I dug into the world of smittens, the more there was to know.  For instance a quick search turns up over 10 000 000 hits for smittens, inexplicably.  A scan of the top hits shows smittens.biz where it seems you can buy smittens.  Wonderful.  Then we have Smitten.com, where it seems you can buy, er, smittens.  Super.  It should be noted that Smittens.biz sells smittens for twice the price of Smitten.com, which makes me a whole lot less smitten about the idea myself.  Then we wander off to the Boing Boing link which tells you how to knit your own damn smittens for less.  So, the lesson to the creator of smittens (whoever you are) is: did you forget to patent your invention for needy couples?  Crap.  Bet you won’t forget that next time….

As a bonus from the Boing Boing comments, a related yet cuter product for parent-child dancing:

shoesforbabyandadults

From a site called Babygadget, it’s a concept, and not a real product, predictably.

Note:  No “silly kittens” jokes were made during the making of this post.

Yes, it’s exactly like Milli Vanilli

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It seems that the quartet that performed at the recent presidential inauguration was as phony as, um, a really big phony thing.  Yes, apparently the illustrious Yo-Yo Ma and the other guys (I kid, but it seems that these people are actually all huge in the classical music world, which really does not intersect with my world) decided that it was too cold to play the event live, so they actually played along to a tape, Milli Vanilli style.  The reason given was the cold would have caused their incredibly expensive instruments to go out of tune and the piece would have sounded like garbage.  Fair enough I suppose, but it really takes the class out of having those guys out there in suits, looking impossibly elite, eyes closed, bleeding the music out of their fingers, wrought with thousands of hours of painstaking practice at their art.  Instead, we heard David the IT guy click “play” on the MP3 on his laptop, or perhaps somebody put the tape into the presidential boombox and slid it a bit closer to the mic on the table.  It’s just not very presidential, and it’s certainly not genuine for those musicians to pretend to play the thing, is it?  The best part is the spokesperson insists “This isn’t Milli Vanilli” but, it really really really is.

This is just slightly better than the whole Olympic thing with the cute-but-terrible-sounding little girl lip-synching to the tape of the only-slightly-less-cute-but-great-sounding little girl.  At least these musicians were playing to a tape of their own performances (or so we were told).

A bunch of phonies