Laughing Meme

Skipped lunch to spend a couple of hours this afternoon hanging at Mojo cafe this afternoon with Mroth and Blaine getting trained up by Steve. Love this photo Mroth snapped.

Steve Ford’s first cups is probably my favorite photo project on Flickr. I’ve been watching for photos of his first cup of coffee each morning for nearly 3 years now (Oct 18th, 2005, when I saw and faved this photo from Ritual). And today he uploaded number 1,000.

And I remember the first drink Steve ever poured for me, at the Linden alley location, in late March 2005, when I was living in Boston, and flying out to consult for Odeo. After that I started flying the 3,000 miles for the coffee, and doing the Odeo consulting on the side.

Flickr trivia: First Cup was the first set on Flickr to get a feed (an official one at least).

Congrats Steve.

I’ll be staying overnight next Friday, along with 500 or so our closest friends at open Hack Day.

If you’re coming, may I humbly suggest you do not place your caffeine needs at the tender mercies of Big Purple. Bring your own, bring some to share, you’ll be popular. (truth be told, they do that whole “soda” thing ok, but the coffee is beyond mention)

And if someone gives me a lift, I’d be happy to bring my Zojirushi, and Saeco

Thursday

r0ml: “I could make the analogy that open source is like the tomato, and how people used to think it was poisonous…. but I won’t”

Still kicking myself for missing Jo’s talk on OSGeo, even if I spent it having a great talk with Surj, Buffington, and crew.

Pulled the eject cord early on the haXe talk (damn you Surj!) and landed in Microsummaries. Something interesting there, unfortunately nothing I couldn’t learn from the wiki. At least I didn’t come out looking as scrunched up and miserable as the folks who went to Python 3000

Building DSLs in Ruby was one of the talk I was really excited about, and I think Neal is probably a really smart guy. However I think this talk might have served as a “How not to build DSLs”. Domain specific languages ain’t about relying on questionable (and soon to be removed) features of Ruby to get kind of sort of English like languages. Please see NLP if thats what you want. Ugh.

Concurrently Google Code Hosting got launched, and was slashdotted before the end of the presentation.
Google Code: “I’m sorry you can’t create a new project ‘Magpie’, a project with that name exists somewhere else on the Web.”
A bit later, “Hmmm, where is the export feature?”

Software Libre, good community organizing around FOSS (just ignore the implicit Marxist critique).

• Step 1. Appears to be get every MIS certified tech-type person to go on strike in protest of election of Leftist government.
• Step 2. un-install all Microsoft products as you no longer have the password that were reset by striking MIS type people.
• Step 3. take over the world!
  Haven’t quite figured how to apply this model to US

Avi makes my head hurt, but in a good way. Great talk, best one I saw at OSCON. Started off judging crowds interest and skill level. (Or he could have just noticed that most of the room had green “Speaker” badges, or worked for O’Reilly, or had written their own frameworks) “Who knows what Seaside is?” “Good, then I won’t waste time telling you about it.” “I know you’re never going to use Smalltalk, its been out there for 4 years, so I’m not going to try convince you to use it.”

Most effective piece of advocacy I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve had people telling me continuations are the way to do web development for years, but watching it in actions is very different. Add to todo list, “Find good book on Squeak“. If you get a chance to see him speak do it. Also if you’re going to give an interesting talk, aim for the last slot of the day so when you come back for an encore the next session isn’t beating down the door.

Took a break to go watch the Eclectic Bastards. Yay for Summar roof top concerts.

Kind of crashed the 6A party, let me tell you OSCON parties are very different then SxSW parties.

Friday

25 years of IBM PC: “Gates’ legacy is the donkey game.” IBM has proof that the last piece of software Gates wrote was a demo game for the IBM PC in 1981 where you tried to get your car across the road without hitting a donkey or alternately tried to hit as many donkeys as possible. (your choice)

Having extracted promises that I could find Fogel’s slides online, and David would tell me the hilights of his talk over beer some night in SF, Jesse and I set out in search of the fabled Stumptown annex. (no links, whole site is Flash, ugh)

Coffee

Arriving too early for the days cupping we were forced to linger over macchiatos, and Clover (hmmm, sexy) pulled cups of the Panama Esmeralda. More then a little buzzed and with our palette totally saturated, we sniffed, swished, broke, and sipped a Kenya AA Gethumbwini (wild and tangy!), a Rwanda Karaba (hmmmmm, chocolate), Guatemala Finca el Injerto (might have just won CoE, and smells great, but doesn’t really register after a cup of Emerelda), Costa Rica Monte Crisol (hot its really aggressively green, like celery, as it cools very very sweet), and of course more Esmerelda.

Ohhh, my spinning head.

I’m sitting at Ritual this morning, contemplating a visit to the source (what does it say that SF arguably 2nd best coffee shop is just serving coffee from Portland?) Then I’ll have to hit Victrola (have standards fallen off?), Zoka, and Lighthouse. Hines is no more, but tonx is Stika & Spruce as a stand in. And Splendido for old times sake, and, and and…

So much coffe, so little time.

Tony has a bit from this morning’s Brazilian auction

When the digital smoke cleared, the last bidder standing was the coalition of Australia’s Instaurator and Vince Piccolo of Vancouver’s Caffe Artigiano paying a record-demolishing $49.75 a pound (about $79,000 for the 12 bags).

A bold move that will have some scratching their heads, but Vince and his crew plan on selling the coffee exclusively via their recently obtained Clover at $5 a cup.

I’ve been pondering that a kiosk specializing in exactly this kind of thing, would probably be smash hit in Manhattan.

Specialized, small space requirements, appeal to the city’s snobbery. Hook it up to a decent online engagement strategy, communicating and blogging around daily specials, cuppings, and general coffee education. I think it would be a hit. And avoid most of the pitfalls associated with starting a coffee shop (especially in a high rent city) In fact, I even fantasized about starting it, until I thought hard about the initial outlay. And it dovetails nicely with my not so secret desire to see the quality of NYC coffee rise if I’m going to be living there.

“It might seem crazy that we were prepared to pay that price,” said Mr. Piccolo, a 40-year-old former fine-dining restaurant owner. “But when you break it down by the cup, it is about the same price that people would pay for a mediocre glass of wine.”

Actually it’s still considerably less then you’ll pay most places in New York for a mediocre glass.

You’re part of a very small group for whom its reasonable for a San Francisco coffee shop to consider a Brooklyn coffee shop competition.

Rabble, on the rather grumpy reception from the kiosk to my excitement about Cafe Grumpy.