Category: Consuming

In my family, no celebratory dinner is complete without at least a token argument about Palestine. Tonight’s was mercifully short: as soon as it surfaced, I began to take the dessert dishes away. That diverted the conversation to how delicious the coffee had been, and from there to my brother’s efforts on the USAID collaboration with the Bolivian Specialty Coffee Growers Association (ACEB). The word is, great Bolivian coffee is getting increasing recognition these days– high-end techniques applied to heirloom bean varieties and high altitude have led to smaller, more intensely flavored beans and quite a good crop in the past few years.

But really, my grandmother says that if you really want to understand The Situation Over In Palestine, you should read One Palestine, Complete, a history of Palestine under the British Mandate.

I have been offered one job so far in my search: a three-week gig updating and rewriting a technical manual at IBM, for which I would not be paid, but would be reimbursed for expenses. The job would have required me to buy a laptop and register myself as a business, which together would have amounted to paying several thousand dollars to cut my Thanksgiving short. I declined, partly because it was a bad deal financially, and partly because I just couldn’t muster enthusiasm for the subject that week.

I am now in the process of applying for a position of grant-writer. This company has a slightly more generous compensation plan: a percentage of every grant you bring in, also known as “eat what you kill.” The subject is genuinely fascinating, though, so I’ll probably give it a try if they’ll let me.

Downtown Wine and Spirits is having its big wine sale tomorrow, including about a hundred bottles open for tasting, and a 25% discount if you get 12 or more bottles. They don’t really have to do it, but you can tell they have that big a party because they like the product they sell and they want people to be able to explore it without penalty. (Cleverly, they make their distributors supply and staff the tastings: each wholesaler gets a table and runs a mini-tasting, and the store barely has to do anything but ring up sales and clean up afterwards).

Online font vendor MyFonts.com has a service called WTF, or What The Font? where you upload an image of some text, and it tells you what font it is. It probably doesn’t sell them many more fonts, and I’ll bet it was difficlt to develop, but it seems like it would be useful to their customers– and enhance loyalty.

In both cases, you can tell that these people like the line of work they’re in, and share that enthusiasm with their customers. MyFonts has little font histories, great mockup tools, and so forth: more than they’d need just to sell a few fonts. Downtown Wine and Spirits has a fun website that carries into the store as well: they write their own little reviews and blurbs, have employee recs, and stock a much wider selection of interesting beverages than most places their size, from locally-made soda to that obscure Japanese beer made with sake yeast and red rice.

Gawker posts the latest updates to Michelin Star ratings in NYC.

Now, most of you probably know how the Michelin rankings work, but I’ve always found it confusing that they just aren’t like most of the other star-ranking systems. I mean, in movie reviews, “one star” means “terrible.” For the Michelin, getting into the damn guide with a no-star ranking is an honor. Getting a single star means that you’ve got a hell of a restaurant on your hands. Three stars means “this restaurant is so good that it is worth travelling a long way just to eat here.” And three is the maximum.

The thing is, Michelin stars indicate not just the goodness of the food, but a certain kind of fancy food. This is no Zagat: no high scores based on the vibe being funky or a local favorite. No bonus for it being a good deal, either: prices are almost always high at restaurants with even one star.

To compensate for that, they added an alternate designation, marked by a little Michelin man wearing a bib, called the “Bib Gourmand.” It indicates casual food that is still quite good. There’s no multi-star ranking for the bibs– just one mark pointing out “this is informal, delicious, and not too pricey.”

Anyway, now I have an updated list of restaurants to go to in NYC when I become fabulously rich. Except Vong. Vong is totally overrated.

There’s this contest, Hands on a Hardbody, every year, where a truck dealership gives away a Nissan Hardbody truck to whoever can keep their hands on it the longest. You get about a few 15-minute breaks every day, and whoever holds up longest keeps the ride. It’s gruelling tortue– people hallucinate, pray, speak in tongues, you name it. There’s an awesome documentary about it, which my roommate a few years ago showed me.

Well, the other year, apparently one of the contestants gave up, walked down the way to the K-Mart, bought a gun, and shot himself.

Via the really nifty Stay Free Magazine, which Gethen pointed me to.

I never predicted that they’d go away, so it might not count as a total error, but I have entirely missed until now that there will be a new show based on Muppets: America’s Next Muppet.

But it looks like I got at least one right: I said that SuperMoto racing would lead to an increase in dirtbike-styled street motorcycles, and sure enough, MotoSavvy gives a positive review to the SuperMoto-based Suzuki DR-Z400 SM. Now, an industry publication doesn’t really count as confirmation of a trend going mainstream. But The New York Times also mentions that bike.

That’s an article mainly about scooters, but it admits that a scooter just doesn’t have the testosterone factor that drives 90% or so of the two-wheeler sales in the US– which is why it suggests the Suzuki SuperMoto bike. NYT also likes the look and feel of a personal fave of mine, the Honda Big Ruckus, although I feel that the Big Ruckus is just too pricey to really take off as more than a niche vehicle: it’s a not as wimpy as the 50cc Metropolitan, but at nearly five grand, you want something that’s a little more… something can weave through traffic and handle potholes and the occasional back yard or highway median while you take your laptop to and from fantasy soccer practice. If a scooter is a minivan, the mid-size dirtbike for the street is an SUV: semi-practical transportation with a dose of vehicular Viagra.

And from the “none of the above” category, Tiger Beer, from Singapore, makes a strong appearance. They have their own soccer team. They sponsor various art and extreme sports events. Their logo has a powerful animal on it. They are unknown and have no baggage. And, when very cold, the beer tastes damn good.

I was out at Gartner ITExpo this past week, where I got to see a hands-on preview of the new Windows, due out some time this decade. It was OK. Major points:

They’re using thumbnail images for everything: hover over an item in the taskbar, and instead of a tooltip you get a thumbnail image of the window it represents. Use alt-tab to switch windows and get a thumbnail image of each window you’re switching between, instead of just icons of the apps. Open a file folder and the document icons are thumbnails of the documents (note: Nautilus has had this since 2000; it’s not that helpful, although it’s nice for image browsing).

They are using 3d somewhat effectively: hit Win-Tab instead of Alt-Tab, and all the windows line up and turn on their sides at a 45 degree angle so you can scroll easily among them with the scroll wheel. That’s a nice touch, although something of a gimmick and no more effective than Alt-Tab.

Search is everywhere: this is the really hyped one. Obviously there’s a search bar in every file browser window. But also there’s a search bar in the control center, so if you can’t remember where the parental controls are, you can search for “parent” or “child” or “security” and it will show you the relevant items. All the apps and so forth have metadata assigned to their launchers, apparently. In the file browser (Windows Explorer, I guess), the data columns include things like “Document Author” and there are extensive grouping and sorting options, as well as searching by metadata. I wondered where all this metadata came from. You can apparently assign keywords to files, but do you have to do that to each file for all this new search to be useful? If so, lame. If not, what do they use to magically generate data? I know Office assigns Author keywords to its files… but is that it? Is that the extent of the metadata magic?

Oh, and they have virtual folders (saved searches) in the file browser. That’s nice, although I doubt it’ll get used that much.

One neat thing in Explorer that Nautilus could use is, when you select a file, you get a little extra info about it in the sidebar. A larger thumbnail, some metadata, the “detail” view. That’s a nice feature. Nothing revolutionary though.

IE has been updated: Oooh, tabbed browsing, nice to see they’ve got that finally. One good addition is a tab that shows thumbnails (here they are again!) of all the tabs you have open, so you can switch easily between them. Not a killer feature, but a nice touch. In addition, where Ctrl+ or Ctrl- in Firefox just changes the font size, it handles full-page zooming in IE– including enlarging images, so they whole page remains proportional. That’s clever. Firefox has an image-zoom plugin, but it’s not integrated like that. IE has also added heuristics-based anti-phishing tools to warn you about suspicious sites. That could be helpful, but I’d hate to be the legitimate bank that got tagged by that.

Well, this Saturday I have a 10:00 AM date with a 1.4 liter (excuse me, 88 cubic inch) twin-cylinder engine attached to a Harley Davidson. They didn’t have the futuristic-looking V-Rod in stock, so we’re going with the Heritage Softail Classic, which is sort of a retro-touring-style bike, and has the advantage of big comfortable passenger seats.

1.4 liters is almost twice as much engine as I have even contemplated wanting. Yes, I’m getting the extra insurance.

Notes in my ongoing obsession with people who have funny names and interesting jobs: Improper Bostonian shopping columnist Mopsy Strange Kennedy and the futurist and trend-tracker Faith Popcorn. Maybe I should change my name to something more interesting, or start going by my middle name or something.