Coffee in Juneau

If you ever happen to be in Juneau, Alaska and are looking for a good cup of coffee, check out the Heritage Coffee Company. They've a couple locations in town and they roast their own beans. Bonus points for offering free wifi!

Pandering

*sigh* I'm going to have to withdraw my support for Hillary. Maybe too much experience can be a bad thing, because right now she's being too much of a politician. The bad kind. With the race dragging on she's now resorting to pandering of the worst kind with her advocacy of a gas tax break for the summer. It's not going to make any difference, and the only reason she's doing it is to gain a few more precious votes.

And it's not just this one thing. It's been disappointing to see that she's always the first to resort to negative attacks and mud slinging.

I still have issues with the details of Obama's health care plan, but based on his conduct during the race so far, at least the character and tone of his administration (assuming he wins the presidency) will be more elevated. And hopefully, his policies will be driven by logic rather than emotion.

Recycling

Recycling is a great idea, but lately I've been noticing a lot of problems when trying to put the theory into practice.

Things that make you go hmmm #1: I was at the Whole Foods in Cupertino a couple weekends ago and was throwing out some trash after lunch and was happy to see that they had trash separation for both regular garbage, compost, and glass/plastics. Shortly after I threw out our refuse from lunch however, an employee came by and collected the garbage from these separate cans and just threw them all into one large cart. The separated trash wasn't bagged, it was just mixed together in the big cart. Seriously, what's the point of even having separate containers if you're just going to mix them up anyway other than to fool customers into thinking that you care?

Things that make you go hmmm #2: I'm at a conference at the Moscone Center in SF right now and they have water coolers scattered around instead of bottled water, which seems like a good idea. But then right next to some of these water coolers, they also have garbage cans marked "compost". Of course, no one else seems to care and just throw out their plastic cups into these garbage cans. While you can accuse these people for not paying attention, I think more blame goes to the organizers for not having the right trash cans in the right locations, because they do have plastic recycling receptacles as well.

Maker Faire

Went to the Maker Faire with C. on Saturday. Traffic around the San Mateo fairgrounds was reduced to a slow crawl and it took us over 30 minutes from the point we got off 101 to the time we finally found a parking spot. I later heard that this was quite good compared to earlier in the day. Even after we got to the gates it was another 30 minutes in line before we could actually get into the event.

Once in though, the Faire itself was pretty interesting. Add odd convergence of DIY, crafts, electronics, environmental and slow food interests. C. was captivated by the booths on composting and Scharffen Berger chocolates while I was drawn to the guys showing off their high speed photography flash kit. We were both intrigued by the possibilities of the Maker Controller Kit, and have been trying to come up with ideas on what we could do with one. Yeah, we're both fairly geeky.

Since we got there fairly late in the afternoon, we didn't spend too much time there since it turned cold as the sun went down and the wind picked up.

Iron Man

Let's do this quick: Iron Man is un-freaking-believably good from beginning to end. Jon Favreau did an amazing job and Robert Downey Jr. is great as Tony Stark. And let's not forget the guys in charge of making the armor come to life...

Definitely go see this on the big screen. Now. 5/5.

Laid Low

Not sure what caused it, but I was laid low on Tuesday with some kind of stomach virus. I ended up sleeping for some 26 odd hours, broken up only by trips to the bathroom. Fortunately, by Wednesday my fever broke so I was feeling much better, and today I'm almost back to normal except for the ominous growlings from my stomach every now and then.