At Dragon*Con!

Here's a little video I just made this morning!

Sam at Dragon*Con 2009 from Sam Chupp on Vimeo.

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."

Leon Dale Photographer calls out the Goblins

I just got an awesome boost from Leon Dale Photographer. He hired local writer Janean Brown to do an interview and an article for him, and did all the photography for the article himself. The result was quite salutory!

Good thing the goblins were fed before I arrived!

Read more »

10 Things I’d like my friends to do for me.

1.) Google their own name.

You may be surprised that your phone number and name are out there in Google. You may realize that the first link for your name is a website that shows you waterskiing while drunk. Just play it careful - you can do things to protect your identity and you should. At the same time, we are all living 100% in the clear and everything we do is reflective of who we really are on the net.

2.) Do something artistic.

This is hard, and I admit it's something I have a hard time keeping up, but I would really love it if all the people I cared about took the time to do something artistic. I'm not saying "be a great painter" or "master hurdy-gurdy music" - just something small and interesting and artistic. Like coloring, needlecrafts, writing a poem, learning to tie silk ribbons, whatever.

3.) Drink more water.

You're probably dehydrated right now. Get yourself a glass of water. You'll feel better.

4.) Do something with your significant other* that is fun and has nothing to do with bills, children, chores, or money.

This is vital. Lack of this is what makes couples feel like just room-mates in their own house. Make it a date and keep the date. You can do this even if you have newborn babies - you should do this especially if you have newborn babies.

5.) Try something new.

A new food, a new way home, a new book, a new article of clothing, something new. Try it, please.

6.) Teach someone what you know.

You can show your nephew how to make biscuits or videotape yourself laying down tile. Show us what you know, the inside game of the things you do.

7.) Tell me what's up with you - the good and the bad.

Many times I think that journals and the like show the "press release" version of people's lives. Kind of like holiday newsletters: it seems that all the kids are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the women are above average.
I know, I've been that way myself, and it's a struggle to find a balance between seeming like you're whining continuously and actually publishing the truth. Hey, if I'm your friend, I want to know about you, warts and all. I can handle the truth!

8.) Practice listening first to understand.

This is hard for me to do, too. Listening first with the objective of understanding means you have to slow down, take your time, pay attention. It means hearing the whole of the statement rather than just the first 20 seconds of it. It requires an attention span that some people just don't have, but I'm encouraging you to try. It helps. It makes everything better.

9.) Call me on my fails, praise me for my wins.

Yeah, if I screw up and hurt you, I want to know. Yes. I also want to know when I do something that pleases you or tickles you or makes you grin.

10.) Write a list like this for me.

Please? I want to know more about you. Even if I know you really well, I feel like life is a journey and I'm damn glad you're along for the ride with me.

* If you don't have a significant other, make sure you're taking good care of yourself for me, OK?

Is Twitter for old farts?

I suspect that Twitter is more for old farts than anyone else.

I recently had the opportunity to meet about 80 newly minted college grads. These folks were close to the top of their class, and in the process of interviewing them about their IT needs, the session leader asked them about Facebook and Twitter.

Apparently everyone in the audience "had a Facebook" in the parlance that was used, but when they were asked about Twitter, there was a lot of groaning and grimacing. I was quite amazed to see such a negative reaction. My expectation after listening to podcasts and reading LiveJournal was that nearly everybody loved Twitter, but apparently not among successful college graduates with Bachelors of Arts and Science degrees here in Georgia.

Now I realize that Clay Shirky says that social innovation can only take place on technology that is so commonplace that it's boring. These days, that means blogs, email, forums, and the like. Getting into Facebook and Twitter is still such a weird thing for a lot of people.

My mom's on Facebook, though. And, I wonder, how many of these students' parents are on Twitter? Older, hipper brothers and sisters?

Of course, I realize that I am in the heart of Atlanta. So maybe this is just an East Coast - West Coast thing. I'm really sorry that this group of bright people have seemed to completely reject Twitter and I wonder what it is that drives them away. Perhaps it is that Britney, Oprah, and Fitty have arrived there before them? Perhaps they're just tired of hearing about it and they've never actually given it a try.

I had a conversation with one of them, where they were talking about why they couldn't understand Twitter, couldn't get why people would want to talk about their lives 140 characters at a time. I asked her if she ever updated her status on Facebook, and she said, "Yeah, all the time. But that's different."

There's no difference, really, between the two. In fact, the TweetDeck program allows one to post directly to both at the same time.

I'm wondering now if we'll even have a Twitter this time next year. We'll see. In the meantime, I'll keep up my Friendfeed, my Tumblog, my Twitter, my Facebook, Goodreads and everything else. I love this stuff - don't plan to stop any time now.

I'm sambearpoet most everywhere, if you want to follow / read me

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.

A beautiful, delicious Method: Method Coffee

Edited to add: This coffee shop no longer exists, a victim perhaps of the recession. Still, enclosed please find my love letter to the coffee shop that used to live there. I have not been to Octane Coffee, which has replaced Method, yet. But I'll try to report on that one when I do.

Method Coffee. What can I say about this place that has not been said? Well, one thing I know is this: the place is clean. The place exudes this simplicity, this cleanliness that makes one feel calmer already. It is, really, coffee for OCD people. I don't mean that in a bad way. The way that attention is paid to small details, it's wonderful. The way that everything has been measured to within certain parameters, it's perfect.

Along the back of the counter are these curiously shaped brewing flasks. Someone took a cone and stuck it point-first into a fairly normal-looking coffee carafe. When you examine it you notice that it is all one piece of glass, continuous. They use oxygen bleached filter cones. They have small glass pitchers that are just exactly the right size, so that the volume of water they hold is exactly the right amount of water for the brewing process. They have small airtight glass containers into which they have measured exactly the right amount of beans per cup of coffee.

One container, one cup's worth of beans. They grind it right there, they put the grounds into the cone, the cone into the brew flask. They then pour hot water, flash-heated by an element to the precise necessary temperature, into the flask's cone. They do it in a circular motion, slowly pouring the hot water so that the cone's contents are equally saturated. The water drains through the filter and the grounds into the brew flask.

They have coffee mugs that are exactly the size necessary to handle one cup of perfect coffee. Prior to pouring the hot coffee, the barista pours hot water from the same source into the mug, and lets it sit, so the mug will be hot enough to accept the coffee. Then the coffee is decanted into the mug, and you have an amazing cup of coffee there.

How amazing? Is it really any different from a drip coffee maker? Yes. Yes, it is. Definitely. This method creates a flavorful cup of coffee that tastes pure. Normally I get a burn in the back of my throat from coffee a little while after ingesting it, I didn't get that this time. There is the "coffee" flavor, yes, but the tastes are complex enough so that if you swirl it around on your tongue you will get hints of all kinds of other flavors. It's like holding a prism up to a light and realizing the full spectrum of possible color.

Yes, the coffee is expensive. Yes, it is worth it.

I can imagine that some people might be intimidated by going in to a place that is so passionate about coffee, but please don't be. If you don't want to coffee geek, you don't have to. In fact, I had no idea what to order, and I just said, "I'd like something that's smooth and doesn't have much acidic taste." I was mentally adding, "Unlike Starbucks'," and maybe he picked up on that. And the barista knew what to do, where to guide me, and he gave a good choice.

Katie had a cup of La Parisienne dark sipping chocolate and seemed very, very happy with it. Just watching her as she excavated every last chocolate molecule from the small sipping-chocolate cup was a delight. She makes me smile when she's so happy. She also took the lovely picture you see here!

Now, to mention the surroudings, etc. They exist in the same location as Caribou Coffee used to be in Emory Village, right next door to Everybody's Pizza. The staff are pleasant and helpful, and like I said, the place was clean. I would love to see what they do with tea.

The price is not cheap, but it is worth it. Lots of value here for your money, in my opinion, but your mileage may vary.

Bing…what is it good for?

Doing an ego search on Bing.com, I am finding the top five results amusing. Wikipedia, my home page, fireheart foundry, Heart of the Hunter, all OK. But onelook.com ? WTF? And that just redirects to Wikipedia.

So what exactly is revolutionary about Bing? Looks like Just Another Broken Search Engine, to me.

Oh, and by the way, microsoft? If I type bing.microsoft.com, I damn well expect to get Bing. Will you fix that?

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.