Want good coffee? Keep an eye out for tatoos!
The more great coffee I experience in different cities, the more I uncover what I think is a hallmark of the really great coffee shops: good baristas serving good coffee usually have tatoos. I have absolutely no idea why this is; maybe the laid-back, groovy atmosphere reacts favorably with the ink, producing some unquantifiable, magical effect. Maybe both that lifestyle, and tatoos, appeal to the same general population of stimulant-addicted yet relaxed people. It's a question for the ages. But I defy you to find a truly top-tier coffee shop who's baristas don't have at least one after-market ornament on their faces, arms, scalp, etc. I've only found one exception so far: The owner of J&S coffee in Lawrence, KS. He makes a wicked espresso, and displays nary a one outward sign of bodily modification...but I will say that if you get served by a random employee of his, you're likely to think that coffee shop is only pretty good. A few other notable examples are: Ritual Coffee in the Mission ...
Posted on June 14, 2007 8:19:12 PM EDT
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OS X: pbcopy Rocks!
I'm still getting to know my new MacBook Pro. In a lot of ways, I'm stuck with rough approximations of the power I used to have on my Ubuntu Thinkpad; mostly this boils down to ignorance on my part and a persistent feeling of having to look a little too hard for answers. It's a lot like having someone come in and rearrange your kitchen while you're out. You come back, and it's a little harder to find the paring knife (I also run into this when either mine or Emily's parents visit, and wind up helping us unload the dishwasher...but that's a story for another day). But I didn't start this entry to rant and rave about how left-handed my new macbook feels; I actually found something really cool tonight among the flotsam and jetsam of this wanna-be linux OS: pbcopy. This nifty utility lets you pipe the output from some random shell command to your clipboard, making is a piece of cake to then paste it into your current editor. This works especially well when you're working with Eclipse IDE, and use the "Java ...
Posted on June 12, 2007 11:36:46 PM EDT
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Our Doctor Friends
We have these friends who we met through the wedding of another, mutual friend. Since the day we met them, they seemed impossibly happy together. True, they were relative newlyweds at the time, but it's pretty hard to deny that these two have a certain chemistry that you just don't see in many couples. As we got to know David and Mindi (or, as we've always referred to them, the Drs. Beahm), they became a sort of embodiment of our ideal couple. Time went on, and as with all great things, our time with David and Mindi came to an end. Emily and I headed to Gainesville, where Emily was to pursue her PhD. The Drs. Beam, meanwhile, were finishing up with med school and starting to look at residency programs. From what I understand, residency is a pretty tricky thing to figure out under the best of circumstances. Finding the best school for your chosen specialty - that you can get into, I mean - involves crisscrossing the country to interview and rub elbows and generally try to make the best impression you can. ...
Posted on June 2, 2007 10:02:04 PM EDT
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