antipaucity

Last year for my birthday, my lovely wife bought me a Keurig coffee machine.

I have used several at different places of work, and had been wanting one for almost a year when she got me one – she’s pretty awesome

I had had a traditional drip coffee maker for years, but only broke it out infrequently – mostly when company came over – because I wouldn’t finish a a whole pot (even a smallish one) on my own, and I have a fundamental problem with throwing the extra coffee away (it’s the Scot in me).

The advantage of the Keurig, and its associated K-Cups, is that it makes one cup at a time: no muss, no fuss (to quote Ron Popeil).

Prior to the Keurig, I had used a Flavia machine at a customer site a few years ago (and at a prior employer), and it was cool – but a little too complicated: it’s very specific about how the packets need to be loaded, whereas the Keurig just accepts them dropped-in.

There are myriad makers, flavors, and styles of K-Cups that be used with the machine, including one that acts as a reusable filter where you can load-up your own coffee for quick brewing. My wife has become a fan of the various hot cocoas and chais available, while I enjoy many of the flavored and plain coffees and teas.

The output of the Keurig is not quite as good as a traditionally-brewed tea or coffee, but the speed FAR more than makes-up for it, in my opinion. And as a cost benefit, grabbing a ~$0.50 coffee from my kitchen in 60 seconds is better than ~$4.50 from Starbucks in 5 minutes through the drive through or having to walk-in. Do the coffee shops have “better” coffee? I think so. Is it 9x better? Rarely – if ever.

If you’re a coffee fan, but not to the level of “snob” or “picky”, then I think a Keurig would be a pretty cool addition to your kitchen.

To help fulfill my stated goal of reading more, I have installed the Kindle app on my laptops. So far I’ve found scores of free ebooks that I’ve either always wanted to read, or figured I’d give a chance since they’re free. The first one I read was a collection of Aesop’s fables.

Some reactions:

• They’re all really short – rarely more than two paragraphs
• I’ve heard the vast majority of them (perhaps with some characters changed) and never knew they were an “Aesop fable”
• Reading with the Kindle app requires NOT using the arrow keys until you want to change *pages* – it doesn’t scroll like Word or a web browser – you *have* to read all the way to the bottom of the screen before “changing pages”
• Not being able to linearly scroll is annoying because it’s how I read on a computer
• Bookmarks are cool – being able to come back to where you were quickly
• “Whispersync”™ – Amazon’s autosynchronizer is pretty cool, too: allows all of your Kindles to be at the “same” place in an ebook

Coming home from Hartford this week, my wife and I got stranded in Detroit (ok, so DTW is in Romulus… but whatever). Our flight into DTW from BDL was delayed a bit, but we still had ~40 minutes to get to our flight to Lexington. However, when we landed we found out that the flight home had been canceled due to winter weather around CVG and LEX (while the accumulations weren’t real high, the winds and low visibility made us happy they had canceled our flight).

Being stranded at an airport is something I have had to deal with on a couple occasions before (once even at DTW 2 years back), but never with anyone other than myself… and never with an important appointment the next day: my wife was slated to have lasik Friday afternoon.

Thanks to Delta’s newer ticketing system, all you have to do if your flight is canceled is to head to a self-service kiosk, scan your boarding pass, and get the new one printed-out. We decided to speak to one of the Delta customer service representatives, though, because neither of us was thrilled with the idea of being stuck in Detroit, and were hoping there might be some form of compensation (even a meal voucher) offered for the weather inconvenience.

Turns out, that when you’re friendly to the customer service folks (whether they be dedicated representatives, gate agents, or flight attendants), they can be quite nice back. When our boarding passes were scanned for our replacements, two hotel vouchers (one for each delayed passenger) and four meal vouchers printed as well! That was pretty cool, and from the automated system. The part about being friendly and asking nicely for a little help that came next was even better: Delta has “toiletries” bags for stranded passengers that include a disposable razor, toothbrush, laundry detergent, toothpaste, and a t-shirt. However, like with many other “perks” – it is up to the discretion of the customer service rep as to whether or not to hand out these “add-ons”. Our guy was very pleasant, and gave both my wife an I one. And told us where we needed to go to find the hotel shuttle that would bring us to the Best Western International Gateway hotel (which, on a side note, was the absolute BEST Best Western I have EVER stayed in!)

I have worked customer service before (and in many ways still do in my current professional services role) – and it is truly astonishing how much better service you can get if you’re not rude to the guy trying to help you out. When I worked phone and email support several years ago, I was never unprofessional to any of my customers, but some definitely received more elaborate responses because they didn’t start off with an antagonistic stance.

For years I have made it a priority every time I come in contact with a “service” representative (waiter/waitress, cashier, ticket agent, nurse, tech support, etc, etc) to be polite to them. If I have a problem, I always try to make it not sound like their fault when I can, and I try my best to be patient with them knowing that regardless of how much I may dislike the broccoli rabe they brought instead of my carrots which I ordered, it probably wasn’t intentional; or that it wasn’t their idea to have a swirling snowstorm ground all traffic into a particular region for the night.

I haven’t been as perfect on this front as we all should be, but a little smile and a polite word can go a very, VERY long way

I find that the more time I tend to have, the less I want to read… but when I’m really busy, I’ll find all kinds of books that look interesting.

With my current work arrangement, I travel frequently, and have been taking the time on the flights (if not sleeping) to read through histories, novels, and other materials that have been on the “to read list” for too long.

To try to help encourage me to read more, I’m going to start writing about the books I read: reviews, summaries, likes, dislikes, rants, etc. Seems like the act of writing helps to gel thoughts and encourages more activity, so we’ll see how it goes.

My wife started blogging recently – and while there’s only one post up so far, I’m sure it will grow

Welcome to the blogosphere, honey =D

It’s been a while since I’ve been to a restaurant worth writing about. Last night I finally found one again.

To celebrate the two monthiversary of marrying my wife (since I had to miss the one month one with work travel), I decided to take her out to a nice place that wasn’t a chain (if possible).

After a coupe hours of searching food review in Lexington, perusing various websites like Google local results and Urbanspoon, I finally went to the old standby, OpenTable. OpenTable doesn’t have every possible restaurant listed, only ones that choose to participate. But it does allow you to look over user reviews, link to the restaurant’s menu, etc. (Yes, other sites do this, too, but OT adds the secret sauce.)

After finding The Julep Cup, less then 4 miles from our apartment, I decided that was where we should go. 111 Woodland Ave in Lexington is on the corner of E Main St, on the first floor of The Woodlands building (along with some other small shops, but we didn’t go in any of those).

For an appetizer, we ordered the Jumbo Lump Crab Cakes and garden salads. For her main dish, my wife ordered the Linguine and Clams and I had their Ricotta and Pecorino Romano Raviolis. Our server, Truitt, was attentive without hovering (we also think he was new, because he was a little nervous, but he did an excellent job). Water and tea glasses were refilled, the courses of our meal arrived in a timely fashion, and we were able to enjoy our meal on their patio in the pleasant evening shade of a late summer day.

The linguine sauce was light but flavorful, and I’m not sure I’ve seen as many clams festooned across a dish that wasn’t just a pound of steamed clams before. My ravioli was fantastic, and the mushrooms and generous romano shavings on top added a nice contrast to the simple ricotta filling.

The Julep Cup (dinner menu) doesn’t require reservations, but they are suggested. Last night, they had plenty of seating available, but I would imagine that’s different seasonally, and on other nights of the week.

The outdoor seating was pleasant, and my wife and I are looking forward to dining there again soon.

I’ve started writing [simple] plugins for WordPress – the blogging tool I use to manage antipaucity.com.

As I write more, if I think they’re worth sharing, I’ll write about them here. A full list will also be available at http://antipaucity.com/plugins.

On the 19th of June, I married my sweetheart. We then went on an awesome trip to the Williamsburg VA area. Like all vacations, that one was MUCH too short, but we had a blast.

Now we’re sadly back to reality – work, grocery shopping, walking the dog.. but that’s cool because I’m spending this time with the awesomest girl in the world!

Love you, honey!

I had been playing with a fun stock market simulator/investing application on Facebook until yesterday. It was called kaching (now defunct). The authors decided to focus their efforts on their for-pay service, kaching.com, and drop the free app on facebook.

That’s all well and good – folks making money does not bother me.

What does bother me is when the maintainers of the application say they are expressly not inviting the 60,000+ users to their new service. A reply I received to a post I made when I found out the app was being removed from one of their admins was incredibly unprofessional and rude. He said they weren’t inviting the facebook users because they were not likely to want to use it, and wouldn’t pay for it.

My request was for the app to be kept up, just have maintenance on it cease and no new features be added. Keeping the app alive would have cost them next to nothing. Removing it has alienated 60,000+ people who [almost] all complained, and have made comments like I am right now warning people away from their “premium” services.

I’m all for folks making money: that is, after all, how bills get paid. I’m all for having a closed platform – if that’s what you want to do (though open platforms seem to last longer and work better overall… but that’s an entire series of posts in its own right). But using 60,000 folks on facebook to effectively beta test your premium services, and then drop them just because you want to refocus, does not bode well for professionalism or future success. No, none of us paid to use the app. But an awful lot of us had a lot of fun playing with it.

Shame they’ve decided to upset 60,000 people in such a way. Even more of a shame is that they used 60,000 people as guinea pigs without telling us.

Active, free alternatives on facebook:

• http://apps.facebook.com/fantasyinvesting

About 2 years ago, I wrote about the problem of holding onto electronic stuff just because storage was cheap.

It wasn’t until I met my fiancee that I realized I did the same thing with “real” stuff – holding onto it just because it was there.

I’m no where near a candidate for Hoarding: Buried Alive (praise the Lord!) .. but I could easily have been in a few years had I not met someone so helpful in keeping priorities about “stuff” straight – if it has a home and can live there relatively neatly.. it’s ok. Otherwise, it needs to be elsewhere.

Why is the self-storage industry doing so well in the US? Why do we own so much stuff we can’t even keep it in our homes? When did “stuff” become more important than people?