Jacksonville IL Coffeeshops

Went up to Jacksonville, IL for my Dad’s retirement party. Decided to visit both the new coffeeshops in town while I was there.

1) Shop #1. Old wonderful 3 story building in old town. Unfortunately old town is not very busy. The shop used home equipment (Capresso brewers) and a home superautomatic espresso machine. The grinder looked like a mazzer mini. Coffee was decent, probably not fresh roasted. Quality of foam wasn’t great. Closed on Sunday and Monday and doesn’t open until 8AM???? How they’ll pay that A/C bill in the summer I don’t know!

2) Shop #2. On the main strip and gets a lot of drive by traffic. Looked like a sub shop on the inside with a roaster in the corner and a small band area in another. Espresso machine was filthy with cooked on milk 3 inches up the wand (preparation problem). No crema on the espresso I didn’t drink 🙂 Had some lunchtime activity but I’d be surprised if they take in more than $700/day. According to my family it is popular on the weekend with the teens since they have a lot of music.

Happy retirement Dad…!

Prepackaged Goods

Wow, PHP, Apache, MySQL, and other useful stuff all prepackaged and configured for multiple platforms. I love open source.
http://www.apachefriends.org/xampp-en.html was easy to install on XP. I ran an install script and started the server. I installed OSCommerce in 5 minutes! server, database, and shopping cart platform all installed in under 10 minutes. Wow. And with PHP I can take the site back and forth b/w Linux (where my web hosting is) to my machine. And it’s not even written in Java!

Tiger!

Met with Calvin Austin today who is the spec lead for J2SE 1.5. Gave a presentation at work and spent time discussing the JRE and 1.5. with him A lot of interesting features in 1.5. Some like autoboxing should have been added years ago. Others like metadata look a bit dangerous but I like the ability to have something like this:

public String @remote getName() {}

The @remote is a metadata tag that could be used to automatically create web services proxy/stub code. This would save going through wizards, or implementing bizare interface classes to hook into a middleware framework. While simple, I think this will revolutionize a lot of Java.

More on Tiger at… http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5/

Ascending Glory

Checked it out the other day. Great location, old S&P Oyster Co. building. Very little leasehold improvements. Painted walls red, put some Christian phrases on the walls, added some fun furniture. Had music, kind of 70’s style Jesus music. When you walk in you have to make a hard turn left to get to the order counter, menu was around the corner – didn’t understand that. Real niche shop. Appeals to fundamentalists but not sure appeal extends further than that. A couple of folks walked in and left while we were there. As I’ve learned though all shops need two visits to render an opinion.

Espresso was fair. Kim’s latte was oversyruped and she couldn’t finish it.

I think it’s too big. Folks at Chauvin thought so too. They’d have to have a LOT of business to support both the lease and the utilities.