Brilliant animation – and nails exactly how I feel about Smooth Jazz. via BoingBoing

Domino’s recently put out an advert featuring a group of guys trying to eat Piri-Piri pizza only to be constantly interrupted by a bunch of musicians. The FAIL here is a cultural one in that the musicians are are supposed to be Portuguese but are dressed as Mexicans!

So why was it so bad? Well in this case the coffee tasted foul because the machine’s not being cleaned properly. Coffee oils go rancid very quickly which means you’ve got carry out regular cleaning routines and keep the machine in top working order.

It’s interesting that in this country we seem to be able to put up with bad coffee on a daily basis. From my experience I’ve got the point where I really appreciate good coffee. Now whilst I consider myself to be no more than an amateur home barista, to me majority of shots I brew taste better to me that the usual Nero or Starbucks. The differentiator for me is that if I brew a shot that’s crap I’ll discard it and start over. From watching baristas at work in chains they really just don’t have the knowledge and understanding to be able to make good coffee which is obvious when you watch the espresso piss out of the portafilter at a rate of knots.

What’s missing from the coffee chains is the passion. Just like anything, be it web-sites or coffee, to stand any chance of being good at something you’ve got to at least be interested in what you’re doing. It’s only in cafes like “Flat White”, “Fernandez and Wells” in soho and “Monmouth” in Seven Dials that you can really find coffee made with passion. These people care that the coffee that you consume is made from great beans and that it’s brewed to perfection by people that understand the chemistry behind the brewing process.

Coffee is an art form, from the grind to the tamp to the temperature of the water and consistency of the milk, each and every parameter has an effect on the result. Just like web developers; the very best developers I know have passion in spades, and they understand how to balance all of the aspects of web development to produce the perfect result.

Do you ever get the feeling your computer is trying to communicate with you. Seems NetNewsWire admires the geek at the controls.

Huh? Don’t get it? Read more about 1337.

An idea brought to you from the freakish depths of Christian Heilmann’s crazy mind and realised by yours truly. On reflection does make some sense as now you can send twitters from TextMate it looks like you’re working!

Simply download the Twitter Bundle, unpack and double click to install the bundle. Before you can twitter you need to configure the update status command with your username and your password. The Twitter API simply uses basic auth to allow you to post new messages.

Once you have it set up, simply type some text, select and press option+t ctrl+command+t to send it to Twitter (Note: If this conflicts with anything you can change this to a key combo of your own choosing in the bundle editor). Currently you get the full response back in a tooltip but I hope to improve on this in due course. By full response I mean the whole xml reponse in all it’s geeky goodness. Now you get sensible message to say a twitter has been sent. See I told you this was nuts.

Use at your own risk. I am not responsible if you bring Twitter to it’s knees (oh hang on it already is!). Uses PHP CLI, if you don’t have PHP on your mac you’re kinda screwed (but I think macs do by default so you should be ok). If you have probs let me know and I might be tempted to re-write it in C, or something else.

Rants, comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome below. Bonus points for silliness.

Versions

Version 0.2

Moved to a shell script. Send from window available. Changed default command to Ctrl+Command+t

Version 0.1

Original Release

Todo:

1. Run update status script from the background to prevent hanging TextMate
2. Publish the command to show the public/friends timeline

Fear not a more comprehensive version is in the works!