Adam’s House of Misc

You put them all on the same train, of course!

(Via Urban Prankster)

Ya’ll should read xkcd.

Deep, syrupy and rich heady smooth body. Strong & bold, earthy & sweet with buttery oomph! An intense and powerful tongue hugger. A blend of five beans from four continents and five different roast levels: Sumatra roasted two different ways, Guatemala, Ethiopian and Papua New Guinea.

This is the description given by Barefoot Coffee Roasters for their element 114 espresso. It is, quite simply, totally awesome.

I discovered back in Corvallis that I really shouldn’t get carried away with drinking too much coffee. Having a three block walk to campus, with a Beanery halfway there was just too much. Starting with a cup in the morning, I would skip to a cup in the afternoon and from there I would eventually stop sleeping, and then stop eating, and eventually crash.

So I try to moderate to one cup of caffinated per day.

I’ve altered this off and on, sometimes going for a half-decaf latte, or using a thermos of half-decaf every day back in law school (because when you’re spending $300/day on tuition, it’s terribly important that you save $.45/day on coffee!).

Anyway, to bring this back to the title of the post, my current course is a double shot of Element 114 espresso every morning, with a packet of sugar. As I said, it is totally awesome.

This happens to be one of the better articles I’ve seen that lets out some of the details of Google’s datacenters and how stuff gets done.

As they say about halfway through, it’s a bit useful to have some CS background to understand the details.  While I currently work on software pretty much entirely not datacenter-related, I’ve used some of these powertools before, and they’re slick.  I also used to give public presentations at recruiting events on the basic details of MapReduce and BigTable.