Pretty funny cor­po­rate dig at elite cof­fee cul­ture. It’s just a shame that Macca’s cof­fee is often not so hot, pre­cisely because it’s too hot.

So much of what they do is actu­ally alright. If McDon­alds was seri­ous about cof­fee they’d have prop­erly trained peo­ple, not machines turn­ing out their coffee. 

What Mac­cas do right:

1. The beans are “rain­for­est alliance” — which is a much bet­ter form of fair trade.

2. They grind on con­sump­tion — unlike some “cafes”.

3. They turn over beans pretty quickly which means they’re unlikely to be stale.

4. Super­auto machines turn out a con­sis­tent product.

Point 4 is pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive. Super­autos pro­duce a prod­uct below the qual­ity of hand crafted cof­fee. A barista fine­tun­ing the grind to meet the con­di­tions will pro­duce a bet­ter cof­fee every time. Mac­cas mass pro­duced approach will also fall short of the qual­ity a cafe using freshly roasted (in house) beans will pro­duce. But it is con­sis­tent. Unfor­tu­nately the only incon­sis­tency is caused by their high school aged cof­fee pro­duc­ers (they’re not baris­tas). Cof­fee extrac­tion occurs at the push of a but­ton. But the froth­ing is still man­ual. And too often the McCafe-ers are guilty of froth­ing the milk to the boil­ing point of water (milk boils and loses its pleas­ant flavour at about 65 degrees).

If you can find a McCafe that doesn’t burn the milk you’ve got it made now that McDon­alds has intro­duced free wire­less nation wide.

Here’s what has excited me from the blo­gos­phere today.

• 57 Inter­net Pos­si­bil­i­ties to Investigate

Some of these are use­ful and help­ful. Some are not.

• 57 Inter­net Pos­si­bil­i­ties to Investigate
• Do Uncom­mon Names Turn Kids Into Criminals?
• The gad­get tribes of technology

Which tribe are you? Worth a look.

• iPhone Rubik Cube Solver Is Pure Genius

I once lived with a guy who could solve a Rubik’s cube in under 2 min­utes — no mat­ter the con­fig­u­ra­tion you gave to him. This iPhone app promises to solve it for you in 20 moves. Reminder to self “thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s iPhone”…

• Google Maps Car Hits a Deer, Records Entire Ordeal on Google Maps
• Robot reassem­bles itself after being kicked apart

The video is a lit­tle slow so I won’t post it here. But this is a step closer to the advent of self heal­ing trans­form­ers who will pro­tect us from the evil decep­ti­con menace.

• Clock for geeks

Here’s a list of math­e­mat­i­cal solu­tions to the pre­vi­ously posted clock.

• Roundup: 22 Most Use­ful Free Appli­ca­tions For Your Computer
• Yet Another App Store — This Time From Three

Is this enough to stop me want­ing an iPhone? I doubt it.

• Pen Con­cept Uses Opti­cal Scan­ner to Let You Choose Ink Colour
• Swiss Police Uncover Hid­den Mar­i­juana Farm Using Google Earth

How do you say “busted” in Ger­man or French… I was going to ask how you say “busted” in Swiss — but the answer is “you don’t”.

• Black Swan author#39;s rules for living

Guide to bet­ter liv­ing. Sample:br“Answer e-mails from junior peo­ple before more senior ones. Junior peo­ple have fur­ther to go and tend to remem­ber who slighted them.“

• Excel­lent old chart of fre­quen­cies and their applications

Become a full spec­trum wor­rier — know all the dif­fer­ent fre­quen­cies out there that might be giv­ing you cancer.

• Samsung#39;s 4Gb chip promises 32GB DDR3 mem­ory mod­ules for PCs and laptops

Wow.

• Duck­lings
• Athe­ism must adver­tise (Part 1)

It seems like just last week I was telling my dad that some­one should cre­ate an Obama hope poster effect cre­ator. And you know what. They have. Here.

Tim sug­gested I write about a link between can­dles and cli­mate change. I can do bet­ter than that.

Every year, at around this time, cli­mate change hip­pies call on us to cut down on car­bon con­sump­tion by switch­ing off our lights. Unfor­tu­nately, this is largely counter pro­duc­tive. As it encour­ages the use of can­dles. Every­body knows can­dles are only to be used for the fol­low­ing reasons:

a) Elec­tri­cal emer­gen­cies
b) birth­day cakes
c) roman­tic din­ners
d) to light fuses of things you’re going to blow up
e) reli­gious cer­e­monies if you’re a Catholic or High Anglican.

Any other rea­son, say aes­thet­ics, or salv­ing your crushed eco-conscience is right out. Earth Hour is a PR stunt. It doesn’t actu­ally do any­thing. I don’t know Jen­nifer Mahoney — I don’t know what her qual­i­fi­ca­tions are. But she’s a pri­mary source whose find­ings match nicely with the objec­tives of this post — so I’ll share these quotes from her less than objec­tive site and a post on earth hour.

“[the first] Earth Hour was held dur­ing a time of peak elec­tri­cal load, so any elec­tric­ity gen­er­a­tion dis­placed would be peak load, prob­a­bly run­ning on nat­ural gas. Such gen­er­a­tion pro­duces about 500 grams of CO2 for every kilowatt-hour.”

Whoops.

“So turn­ing a 100 watt light bulb off for an hour saves 50 grams of CO2, or 13 grams of car­bon. A can­dle is mostly car­bon by weight, and can­dle wax is only mod­er­ately less dense than water at room tem­per­a­ture. This means that burn­ing just 5 cm of a typ­i­cal 2 cm diam­e­ter can­dle will pro­duce more CO2 than run­ning the 100 watt light bulb for an hour. If the light that was turned off is flu­o­res­cent, then even less can­dle can be burned if there’s to be a net reduc­tion in CO2.”

Dou­ble whoops. Can­dles are not only mod­er­ately effem­i­nate — they’re also bad for the environment.

I’ve writ­ten a lit­tle about Colony Col­lapse Dis­or­der and the impend­ing doom of the US Ice Cream industry.

 Cli­mate Change is killing bees. All over the world Queen bees are left to their own devices. They can’t save them­selves. The finely bal­anced eco-system is on the brink of decay. Seriously.

 Colony Col­lapse Dis­or­der could well be cli­mate change’s most sig­nif­i­cant impact. You think the global finan­cial cri­sis that was caused by the sub prime mort­gage col­lapse is a bad thing? That col­lapse has noth­ing on colony col­lapse. Do you have any idea the stag­ger­ing num­ber of US prod­ucts made with honey as an ingre­di­ent? Mil­lions. Lit­er­ally. Ok, I made that up. But there’d be a lot. Whole prod­uct lines will have to close down. Hokey Pokey Ice-cream… pop­u­lar break­fast cere­als… not to men­tion honey jum­bles… this is a big deal.

But you know what else is under threat. We’ve cov­ered the econ­omy, the world’s bee pop­u­la­tion, the break­fasts of cham­pi­ons… but wait, there’s more. Can­dles. Gen­uine beeswax can­dles will be a thing of the past. And WE’RE BURNING THEM. Well not me. I wouldn’t (except for the afore­men­tioned accept­able rea­sons). I’m straight. I’m not a can­dle kind of guy. But YOU are burn­ing them. You know who you are. And not only are you killing the envi­ron­ment — you’re adding to the rel­a­tive scarcity of wax prod­ucts and dri­ving up prices.

If bees die out wax will become a much sought after com­mod­ity. Prices will sky­rocket. How then will Mad­dam Tus­sauds pro­duce their ecclec­tic range of afford­able wax based enter­tain­ment? You are burn­ing the chances of future British Roy­als to bee(sic) immor­talised in wax. What would Kate Mid­dle­ton say? Other than “stop burn­ing those can­dles”. Heathen.

So what should we be doing with can­dles you ask? Since we can only light them on par­tic­u­lar occa­sions for spe­cific rea­sons. Good ques­tion. Bank them. Wait for the stu­pid­ity of oth­ers to cre­ate a can­dle cur­rency — a trade in what will soon be earth’s most valu­able com­mod­ity. Vic­to­ria Beck­ham will thank you when Mad­dam Tus­sauds are able to incor­po­rate her new hair exten­sions into her waxy self. 

Wax banks could be hives of activ­ity. Alter­na­tively you could put your can­dles in a cup­board and mind your own beeswax. Still you don’t want to be court in a bee sting — or in some honey pot of wax cor­rup­tion so per­haps it’s just best for you to steer clear of can­dles alto­gether. Leave them to mis­guided hip­pies and go about your daily business.

Geeks love over­clock­ing. Mak­ing their com­put­ers more hard­core than the out of the box version. 

My wife loves this clock. And geeks will too. $US20 from Etsy. Found via Boing Boing. 

Dear Read­ers,

I don’t like to beg. Really. It is so unbe­com­ing. Des­per­ate even.

I’m get­ting more vis­i­tors than ever before to this blog. And less comments. 

Why don’t you com­ment? Don’t you love me? Am I bor­ing you?

It’s really not that hard to com­ment. Is it? You don’t even have to have any­thing use­ful to say. Is it because I used to insult com­menters I dis­agreed with? I’m a changed man. Promise. Try me. 

I do get a lot of com­ments from peo­ple try­ing to sell Xanax and via­gra. But that’s no good for the self esteem.

It makes me sad. 

Is there a topic that would evoke more com­ments? Some­thing that would gen­er­ate a “buzz” or some con­tro­versy maybe?

That’s enough grov­el­ling for now. And pan­der­ing. Don’t make me use my sad eyes.

Here’s what has excited me from the blo­gos­phere today.

• Design Your Per­fect Fight­ing Moves With Toribash

Looks cool. Kind of like the clas­sic “tanks” but with the human body.

• DIY Couch

I’ve always thought that if we one day own a house I’d like to build a couch into the walls of the lounge­room. If you’re like me you’ll enjoy this project log for doing just that.

• 10 Web­sites To Make You A Pho­to­shop Ninja
• The United States of Coffee

The good news is Aus­tralia has it’s own bou­tique roast­ers that will keep you away from the evil (AOG) owned Glo­ria Jeans, McDon­alds or Starbucks.brTownsville has its own bou­tique roaster Cof­fee Domin­ion, who ser­vice cafes all over the north.

• Aer­ial shots of Lon­don by night — magic
• Sci­en­tists Rank Global Cool­ing Hacks
• Buz­zGain Launches Do-It-Yourself PR Ser­vice To The Public
• Updikes#39;s Rules on Review­ing Books
• Christ and State
• Vir­gin Atlantic Asks Com­plaint Writer To Be Taste Tester [Fol­low Ups]
• ZOIKS! Star­bucks’ trou­bles continue
• Do you talk too much?

This is true — unless you’re telling the trac­tor joke. There’s an excep­tion to every rule.

• 20 Use­ful Resources for Learn­ing about CSS3

I’d say the list of peo­ple excited by the upcom­ing release of CSS3 spec­i­fi­ca­tions is pretty short — but if you’re respon­si­ble for any kind of web design these will be useful.

• If CS4 came on floppies…
• The True Cost of Credit
• Bit of a Blow
• An Expert’s Guide To Napping
• Whspr Lets Any­one Send You An Email With­out Reveal­ing Your Email Address
• It’s Data Pri­vacy Day: Do You Know Where Your Data Is? [Privacy]
• Beware! The­olo­gians.

From here. Some­where. Spot­ted here.

There’s a set for­mula for writ­ing hack­neyed cricket head­lines that goes as follows:

“{Sub­ject} hits {play­ers name} for {six} or {actual fig­ure based on the story}.”

You can alter­nate that with a pas­sive voice for­mat for vari­ety. But very rarely should you ever leave that trusty for­mula com­pletely. Unless you want to be inter­est­ing and engaging.

Case in point: CA hits Symonds for $4000

Ok, so I may be exag­ger­at­ing– the SMH to its credit doesn’t have a whole lot of those. At the moment. But it’s such cliched head­line writing.