Jeff Carlson (.Thought)

Gruber Is Gonzalez?

This will appeal only to the Mac nerds, but I've made the shocking discovery that musician José González is actually Mac pundit John Gruber:

Helvetica Coffee Mug

Love love love love love this:

(Found via the excellent swiss miss)

Love the BBC

"To Burundi and Beyond for Coffee’s Holy Grail"

I'm a late convert to coffee. Before college, it was this brownish muck that everyone older than me drank. And then at some point I had a mocha, and from then on I was mixing Carnation Hot Cocoa mix and some ground French Press from a can to get me through my classes. It's only relatively recently that I've developed a taste for espresso by itself.

Which explains why the whole stratosphere of coffee origins seems almost alien to me. Of course I know that coffee beans come from plants around the world, but I couldn't tell you much about any of them. But it's a fascinating subject, especially now that independent roasters are buying high-quality beans directly from the farms. In "To Burundi and Beyond for Coffee’s Holy Grail" (The New York Times), author Peter Meehan writes about companies such as Portland's Stumptown and Chicago's Intelligentsia and how their owners spend a good deal of time bean-hopping the globe. Meehan's lead is particularly inviting:

DUANE SORENSON had planned to fly to Yemen, rattle up dirt roads in dusty four-by-fours and dart through the Arabian sky in prop planes as he toured the country searching for open-minded coffee growers. Mr. Sorenson, who is the owner of Stumptown Coffee Roasters in Portland, Ore., intended to offer the farmers more money than anyone ever had before in return for a promise to improve their crops.

I'm up late working on multiple deadlines, so I just made myself a double espresso, using beans from local micro-roaster Vashon Coffee Company (which I purchased from Seattle Coffee Works downtown).

The January Project

If you've been paying attention to my Flickr gallery lately, you may have noticed a recent picture called "Bump". That's not just a random belly: Kim and I are going to be parents near the end of January!

I know, we're rushing into this - we've only been married 14 years - but we're excited. Mom-to-be is healthy and growing, and Dad-to-be is simultaneously giddy and terrified (depending on the minute).

TidBITS Redesign Is Now Live!

This has been a long time coming, and now I'm happy to announce that the redesigned Web site for TidBITS is now live. The backend was built by Glenn Fleishman, I did the graphics and HTML/CSS, and publishers Adam and Tonya Engst herded Glenn and I.

We'll be talking more about the redesign in TidBITS in the coming days and weeks, so I won't go into much detail here. But I want to defend myself a little before the Web designers out there and say that the priority was on shipping, so the CSS and HTML isn't as clean as it should be (and it's not quite 100% valid with the W3C's validator); but that will be rectified as we go along.

The last time I did any significant Web design work was when we used tables to do layout (plus a bunch of other ugly hacks). Glenn and I even wrote a 1,000 page book about Web design using Adobe GoLive way back when. Doing the TidBITS site was a clear revelation: there are no tables that aren't comprised of actual tabular data; it's all CSS; and CSS is really a wonderful thing.

Un-damn: $100 iPhone Rebate

I shed a little tear yesterday at the news that the iPhone dropped $200 in price, but today I'm dry-eyed: Apple to Offer $100 iPhone Rebate for Early Purchasers.

8 GB iPhone Now $400. Damn.

Yes, I finally broke down and bought an iPhone - on August 8, which inconveniently for me is outside Apple's 14-day price protection guarantee. That means I paid $600 a month ago for what costs $400 now.

But I'm not really upset, honest. Every single time I get a phone call, I feel a zing of excitement because Apple did the experience right. And, as John Gruber wrote:

(And for those of you who’ve already bought one and are pissed about the price cut, if you didn’t think the iPhone was worth $599, you shouldn’t have bought it. That’s how supply and demand works.)

My other favorite quote of the day is from poster "bdkennedy1" on Macworld's forums:

I swear, Steve could stick a touch-screen on a toilet brush for $900 and someone would buy it and whine.

Toilet touch! It's so crazy, it just might work.