Two new Fantasy Audio Books coming! WOOT!

I am very happy to see two new fantasy audiobooks releasing soon!

The first one I heard about is Nathan Lowell's Ravenwood. The URL for his website is http://www.lammaswood.com/

Here's a blurb about Ravenwood:

Tanyth Fairport makes one last pilgrimage in her quest to learn all she can about the herbs and medicinal plants of the world before settling down to write her magnum opus. Her journey is interrupted when she stops to help a small village and learns that much of what she knows of the world may not be quite as it seems.
This is not another science fiction novel set in the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper, but a fantasy set in a whole new world where magic is madness and adventure isn’t something you seek out.

Also there is Paulette Jaxton's The Empress Sword which is at http://empresssword.com/

Here's the blurb about Empress Sword:

A Prince, a Dragon & a Magic Sword – all the elements of a classic adventure story.

Unfortunately for Prince Aster of Caledon the dragon in question may not be the evil beast he thinks it is, and the magic sword might not even let the adventurous young prince touch it. When Aster discovers the price he must pay to save his kingdom, he’ll have to make a choice no self-respecting adventure book hero would even consider.

This is not your father’s epic fantasy story, but it might be you’re cousin Trudy’s.

The Empress Sword, it’s Eragon meets Twelfth Night.

I look forward to listening to you both!

Does my soda fountain need to be this complex?

I encountered this soda fountain yesterday in my regular travels. When I first went to fill my cup, I selected Coke, then Cherry Coke. It said, "Choose another selection." Um. OK. Why did you offer me the icon for cherry coke if you don't have it? I understand that when the analog Cherry Coke fountain runs out of syrup or whatever, it's over, you just have to taste it to know. But at least I recognize that. In this case, I'm sitting there thinking "OK, if you show me the icon, darnit, I want to be able to use the icon."

The soda fountain person spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how to not only refill the cherry flavor cartridge but also how to make the machine realize that, while it was sleeping, the cherry cartridge had been replaced. This was a little harder than it might seem to be.

One of the soda brands offered on the screen is "Dasani." Dasani is "water." Dasani is actually specially filtered water, right? Do they have a special water filter in the machine, or is this really just tap water? I asked the guy, and he wouldn't say, his eyes got all glassy and he just sort of wandered off.

I can predict what's going to happen here. Eventually they will stop buying flavor cartridges, and eventually people will have to hunt around five or six screens to find even the main brand of drink they're looking for. This is fine because it is the way of things.

But it is kind of nifty looking, and I got a chance to see the operating system. I think they are using a linux backend on an embedded XHTML-based front end but don't quote me on that.

I do know that clicks are being counted. So, in a while, Coca-Cola will have market research live, direct from tens of thousands of locations, as to what people actually prefer to drink given their druthers.

For myself, I'd rather just have Cherry Coke. And I did, eventually, once the machine realized that it was cherry-full again.

It didn't taste like Cherry Coke, which is a bit of a blended flavor. It tasted like regular coke with some kind of generic cherry flavor added.

Oh, and by the way, somebody needs to tell the designer of this thing that the ice flows down into the trough and then out onto the floor and gets all over everything. This is suboptimal for people who don't want to slip and fall.

Ah well, at least its innovative!

Happy birthday Rowan!

My son, Rowan, has a birthday today. It's been a long day, so I'm glad I get to post this.

Rowan, I hope you're celebrating tonight. Happy birthday, I'm glad you're in the world.

Here let me get that for you…

I can define this alert for you, MARTA.

MARTA was supposed to be free. Back when it was first created, the idea was that you should be able to waltz on to the train / bus combo and waltz off without paying a red cent.

That changed. The fare hikes have been coming throughout the years, and now this October 1st, MARTA claims they're going to go up to $2.00 a shot.

This is after they posted PROFITS over the last two years. This is after they just launched a brand new website (the "System Alert" function of which is...um...not working yet?)

I'm alerted. I'm alerted that someone is playing power politics - I don't know who. I'm alerted that, yet again, poor people are going to be shouldering the bulk of the burden to keep the roads clear for the expensive gas guzzlers.

So much for the Green Economy. The only color green at work here is that Dollar Bill shaded color. It doesn't matter that it's a better idea to put your money into mass transit, INCREASE service, LOWER fares than it is to BUILD MORE ROADS.

I just don't understand.

Why is MARTA quoting the fact that they got back-up money from the stimulus package as a means of explaining why they are raising their rates? That is a complete smoke and mirrors argument.

Here's why your rates are going up:

1.) Transportation costs are going up because of the cost of oil, and MARTA hasn't reinvested in enough infrastructure to cut down on the costs over the long haul by switching to electricity and other alternative fuels.

2.) The State Legislature couldn't give two figs for MARTA - they see it as an Atlanta city problem, not as a state problem.

We've gone so far away from the original vision of MARTA: a free transportation system for everybody. If we funded MARTA like we fund our schools, then nobody would have to pay and there would be posh velvet seats on every bus and working elevators and escalators on every platform.

Where are our priorities, in a bad economic time? They shouldn't be "Make it harder on people who can't afford / choose not to contribute to our growing bad air / carbon problem."

This is not a healthy cow….

Every time I see this logo, I get a shudder. Cows are not supposed to be this skinny, so a skinny cow is a sick cow.

What's next? The Scabrous Pig?

It just drives me crazy.

Yet Another Coffee Post: Additives!

A meditation on coffee fixings:

I've visited a lot of coffee shops in Atlanta. Not every one of them. Not yet. But I have done it as much I could on my budget and with the time allotted to me, and keeping in mind that my life partner, Cynthia, and my step-daughter, Katie, don't really drink much in the way of coffee. OK, I take that back; Cyn loves herself a good ol' raspberry vanilla venti mocha when the mood sets. And Katie has been known to partake of The Chai, as they say. However, I don't think it really occurs to Cynthia to actually make a coffee shop as a destination; it's more of an add-on to any other activity. For me, though, going to a coffee shop is a treat.

It is a bit difficult to judge the coffee shop. I've written a few reviews on Yelp (and plan on writing more later), and I notice that other people write a lot about the coffee and the snacks they serve. To me, though, the snacks are secondary and the coffee and service are noteworthy but not the primary thing.

The thing that really gets me is how the establishment lays out fixings for the coffee. I can immediately tell a lot about a coffee shop from just that.
First question: do they have half and half? All health considerations aside, half and half is the stuff I put into my coffee. If they don't have it readily available, then I might as well not even order coffee.

Second is their sweetener assortment. In most of the indie coffee shops around Atlanta, I am used to seeing things like sugar syrup (which apparently is cane sugar boiled into water?), raw sugar (which is sugar with the molasses unextracted), stevia or its commercial equivalent, honey, and sometimes arcane and mystic sweeteners that may have been decanted in some unholy but satisfying process birthed in the lower depths of the abyss (like, say, sweet n' low).

Then there's the Stirring Mechanism. Stirring is a vital step in doctoring any drip coffee. One cannot just dump their sweetener and cream into the stuff and have done. So, I've noticed a range of means to address this problem. The spectrum goes from incredibly environmentally unfriendly to extremely environmentally friendly. On the unfriendly end of the spectrum we have ittle wooden stirrers that are undoubtedly rendered from Amazon rainforest trees. It is impossible to stir one's coffee with one of these things, so it requires three or four or more bundled in one's fingers just to get enough surface area to stir, which just exacerbates the fact that more precious Amazonian rainforest is needed per cup of coffee. Next to that are plastic coffee stirrers; once again, one stirrer is not enough to do anything with, and as an added benefit the billions of them will still be around 20 years from now, making a kind of plasticky thatch somewhere in a landfill. Still a bad solution, in my opinion.

As are plastic spoons, for roughly the same reason.

One very intriguing solution to this problem I found at Danneman's in Old Fourth Ward district. They make available to their patrons long sticks of dried plain fettucini as a means of stirring. The stuff biodegrades, it's cheap, it doesn't change the flavor of the coffee, and the blades of fettucini make for a better stirrer than the rainforest-wood kind or the plastic. I still needed three of them to get any motion going in my coffee, and I started having fantasies about coffee-flavored fettucini, perhaps served with a bit of sun-dried tomato and pesto. I suppose it is a bit of American arrogance to use what is effectively a food product to stir our coffee and throw it away, but at least it is better than plastic-thatch.

Getting close to the other end of the earth-friendly spectrum are spoons. The only downside to spoons is the disposal of the dirty spoons. Now, most places have clearly labeled bins that say "CLEAN" and "DIRTY", and at that point you need to just depend on the intelligence and / or literacy of your fellow coffee drinker that they understand the concept. I find spoons with clean and dirty bins to be the best of all stirring worlds; I use one spoon, I get my coffee stirred, and I put it in the dirty bin, and at some juncture a nice person with hot and soapy water cleans the spoons, and nobody has to put up with anything in the landfill. I would think that the cost of doing this alone would be a no-brainer for any coffee shop owner, but I'm still amazed to find rainforest sticks and plastic stirrers everywhere.

I realize that washing the dirty spoons must be a pain, and that, probably, not everybody gets the whole "clean/dirty" thing; a few times I've had to transfer a potential spoon from clean straight to dirty, without touching the coffee.

Still, I am certain that the cost of 40 metal spoons is not as much as the boxes and boxes of plastic and wood stirrers people use.

There are other coffee shop considerations. I like places that use fair trade coffee. I enjoy places that offer big ol' coffee mugs instead of paper cups as a first option. Drinking coffee out of a mug is infinitely preferable, if you can afford the time to wait, than drinking out of a paper or plastic cup.

The worst places I've been to really don't care about their fixings. They put out non-dairy creamer powder, or just 2% milk, or whatever. Or, like one coffee shop, they don't bother to refrigerate their dairy and the half-and-half is sitting out in a box on the countertop, getting warm. When I asked the barista about this, he admitted that he didn't think there was anything wrong with it, and that he rarely has to throw out any, but I like my half-and-half to be cold and reasonably free of bad bacteria.

As I mentioned in my Method Coffee post, if the coffee is good you really don't need any additives. But I love them - they help make the whole experience.

Modified RE: Your Brains. Awesome.

This here's a rework of RE: Your Brains by Jonathan Coulton. Check out Jonathan's wonderful music here.

I think Mur should use this for her Zombie Takeover podcast, only I think it's wrapped already. Oh, well.

It’s Working, Y’all

In case you were wondering whether all this booty-shakin' in the podcastosphere on behalf of our favorite podiobooks.com authors is working, certainly Amazon has figured it out! Woot!

I love Wolfram Alpha….

http://bit.ly/O9rgE