I’m Sorry Trader Joes.

I like a lot of your products! I want to like your coffee.

  • Comes in fun cans
  • Less than $8/lb average
  • Quite a few varieties
  • Quick and easy (minutes from home).

It just seems stale to me. I’ve tried a few cans over the last year. The aroma when opening a coffee container says a lot, and your coffee is pretty quiet. I suppose darker roasts have enough of a caramelized roast flavor to make up for the complete loss of varietal flavors for some people. To me it is just terribly boring – they all taste pretty much the same to me.

I can only guess the canister isn’t as good as the valve bag?

Update 4/22/08 : Tried a very dark roast (yeah, I’m punishing myself). I have only seen beans that crumbly and oily when I forgot to turn off the roaster. I threw them away. I always wondered what that would taste like, now I know. Don’t bother.

Great Commericals.

Apple has great commercials. The PC/Mac guy ads are always good for a laugh. Here’s one if case you haven’t seen them.

I recently got an iMac, 20″ LCD screen. I’ve mostly liked it. I’ve had problems with some of the graphics I created for my friend Steve’s website. The top graphic has a background with a slight gradient that looks great, except on my Mac. On the Mac it’s invisible. I assume it’s something about the Safari browser at first, but then FireFox on the Mac has the same display problem. I’m baffled. Maybe my windows graphics program creating some magic windows-only jpeg image!

Then coincidentally my friend Brian tells me about the new class action lawsuit on the iMac I bought. Now all of a sudden it makes sense. It’s the monitor! So I send the URL to a friend with a new macbook – he can see the image fine. It’s time to visit the mac store and make sure it’s not just my monitor. This would be a huge disappointment. I mean I’m used to computer companies advertising false things, using cheap stuff, and of course Windows.

Maybe I believed the commercials…

A Solution to my Latte Art Problem

I’ve had a lot of practice at this, and I’m still not very good at it. Is it the quality of the foam or pouring technique issue? We had our friends Brian and Angela over this Sunday and I made a couple of lattes. One was “abstract art”, the other a “scorpion” (so they were not successful). It is fun trying.

I’m not sure my wife would let me put this on the kitchen counter…

Read More … I just need a flatbed plotter and edible ink…

GPS

Well… I finally took the plunge. I bought a refurb Garmin 550 from buy.com for $179. I’ve wanted one for my wife, and for when we travel – but I also wanted one for bluetooth phone integration (as a speakerphone). The price point was always $350 or more – more than I was going to spend. $179 no tax, free shipping – DONE.

gps

Garmin calls the refurb units “Completely Overhauled”. My wife said, “I think I like REFURB better”. My only observation is the volume knob seems a bit sticky but not worth trying to replace. Screen, etc. all looks superb. Great interface, simple setup, and even works with my AT&T 8125 phone. So far it has exceeded all my expectations but one. It doesn’t allow me to load destination addresses from my phone (maybe would require Bluetooth ADAP protocol).

Works like a champ, Garmin has this nailed – great Navteq maps. 5 stars so far. Go ahead Frank, sell the Newton, get a Garmin… It’s half the size.

Where to be Social?

Social networking tools are becoming a commodity. Look at the script panel of any Internet hosting company and you’ll see blogging tools, interactive content management systems, wikis, and more. There are also a host of free software service sites. Blogger.com and wordpress.com are just a couple examples in the blog space. These online services offer something more than software – they provide an audience!

Through the front page of these sites, taxonomy, and search people can find your content. These sites also are starting to provide integration with other social media through open APIs like OpenSocial.

So given the option of self-hosting a site or using online services what should a person or organization choose? While there are a lot of variables to consider, I think integrating online services into a hosted community is a great option. Maybe your thought leaders should have a blog on blogger.com and incorporate that into your website with RSS/Atom. That gets your organization a place on the larger internet but still allows the content to be part of your custom website.

I think smaller organizations and communities can greatly benefit from hosting a package that best fits their needs. That might be a wiki, SN Site (PHPzabi, Dolphin, etc) or CMS (like Drupal or Joomla). Using blog feeds, IM presence indicators, and flexible profile options allow for the greatest community customizations while embracing what is already available as a service on the web.

This opinion is subject to change next week 😉

Mac Update

Some people have been asking me questions about my blog. I realized something amazing! SOMEBODY IS READING IT.

Would I replace all my windows machines? No. I simply couldn’t afford it. All the software my kids have doesn’t run on it. I can’t afford it. If I was buying a new laptop – it would be a Mac. For the family machine the Mac is working great. I think as I move more toward software services like Gmail with smart apps that can manage those software service I become less concerned with the OS anyway.

I used to think Apple ripped you off on service, etc. Then I looked at the prices at BB and CC (geek squad etc).

K9 comes to the Mac

No, not a dog – a web filter! K9 is an amazing tool for filtering internet content. If you don’t like that idea just stop reading NOW.

Bluecoat is a company that sells industrial strength security and filtering tools. One of their assets is a huge categorized list of Internet sites and their general category. Is the site business, porn, movies? it’s all in the database. K9 is a free tool Bluecoat created for home users to filter internet requests. Most filters just look at the words on the website and make a guess if the content is OK. They use PICS ratings and other things but the bottom line is content filtering only gets you so far. K9 brings an immense categorization of the Internet to the table so most sites can be screened out (or in) with ease. K9 drops down to do content filtering if the site isn’t in it’s database. One thing I like about K9 is you can set it up to only allow sites in a certain set of categories and if it doesn’t know about the website it blocks it. K9 runs in the background – you forget it is there. It doesn’t hog your CPU, slow your internet browsing, or give you a lot of false warnings.

K9 has one HUGE problem. It’s only available for Windows.
Mac has one HUGE problem. Apple’s parental controls filtering is pathetic. The other filters are content only and are EXPENSIVE.

Bluecoat has announced there is a Mac version coming in early ’08! Problem solved. To the folks at BlueCoat – you’ve done a great service to parents and more, keep up the good work. Your product helps protect people from some of the worst society has to offer.

iMac – Week 1 & 2

Ok, it’s just different. Different in good ways and in stupid ways. I can’t figure out why alt-tab shows me only icons of maximized windows. Couldn’t it be an option? No fear, get the free program “Witch” to help pick “Which” app you want – including the minimized ones. I’ll put a list of my favorite freeware items in an iMac HOW-TO since _____ will be asking for it soon.

The other day I got a kernal panic! How fun. OS X says, “Please power off your computer now”. Better than blue I guess. When I restart I find that the parental controls caused it. Hmm… How does that happen? This is unix right? I thought kernal panics mostly happened when there were system problems – maybe parental controls goes deeper than I expected, I just doubted it since the options are slim.

Part of my frustration has been some simple free software – like easy image editing, etc. I’ve found a bunch of that and am happy with some of that software.

The screen is great, the UI is fun, it takes up no room. It crashes but not like XP. No mysterious hangs like Vista. 1GB of RAM is plenty for 2-3 users with apps running. I’ll still give it a thumbs up.

The iMac day 2 and 3

What were they thinking? I have some complaints:

1) Great large screen. Why allow me to have tons of windows and then require me to mouse to the top of the screen for my drop down menus. I know – shortcuts. I didn’t need them on Linux/Windows. I like drop down menus. Really.
2) Themes? Umm… What am I missing? I can’t change the window decorations, etc? Odd. I must be missing something here. Windows and Linux do it and well.
3) Mail. Close – but it chokes on importing my thunderbird email. I was looking forward to using it. Instead using Thunderbird still.
4) Mouse button. So there are apps that use the 2nd mouse button but you use command button and the mouse? I know, I’m a windoze dummy.

I like:
1) iChat – works just right, love the camera
2) Monitor. It’s just great.
3) Calendar, nice app.
4) Software, most my fav open source apps still work.
5) X11…. I started an xterm… oh…..

I got an iMac

Well… It is supposed to be simple. I didn’t get one with Leopard installed, so I ran the install disk and did a clean install. Now I’m missing all my bundled software… Back to the original disks to try installing just that. So far okay, but i did expect more of an out of the box experience from Apple… More to come.