Global Reset

My new home for my blog, globalreset.org, is being hosted by Dreamhost.com. I was referred to them by a friend of mine, and I’m glad I chose them. It’s pretty reasonably priced, at $7.95/month, and has a pretty powerful web-based management system. The reason I chose them, over similarly priced competitors, was that they offered shell access and webdav support. Also, the Pragmatic Programmers are pretty excited about this Ruby on Rails thing, and Dreamhost supports that as well (and you won’t find a similarly-priced competitor with that offering). As soon as I get that infinite free time thingy, I’m going to investigate this Rails framework.

In any case, if you want to try Dreamhost, I have a promo code that you can use: GR1337Promo. It’ll take $50 off your order. So, if you order just a month-to-month plan, it’ll basically waive your setup fee. If you pre-pay for one year (there is no setup fee in this case), it’s about half off the cost of your first year. Feel free to re-distribute this promo code. Full Disclosure: I get a referral fee of $47 each time one of you save $50.

Welcome to the new home of my blog, GlobalReset.org.

If you’re reading this, you’ve either gotten the new URL from me, been redirected to the new URL from the old homepage (on BlogSome), or you subscribe to the FeedBurner feed. I’ve already updated the FeedBurner feed to point to the new site, which is terribly convenient for folks who subscribe. Unfortunately, that means you might see the last 10 or 15 posts as “new” posts. I apologize for that inconvenience.

I’ve been slack on updating for the past few weeks, but that’s mainly because of this transition. I hope to be able to make a lot more regular updates from here on. I’ve got a list of things I’ve been meaning to write about.

Evolution of Coffee Originally uploaded by globalreset.

The future of coffee is here, and it’s bit more bland than I expected.

I really enjoy the taste of the coffee I get out of my French Press, especially if I’m using fresh beans. I’m not pretentious enough to actually have a favorite bean or anything. But the only downside to the French Press is the clean up afterwards. It takes a lot of scrubbing to get those coffee grounds out of every crevice it’s filter creates. On a weekend morning, though, it’s quite worth the extra effort.

Then there’s the pod coffee maker. It’s hard to beat the convenience of this thing. You just drop a tiny “pod” of coffee, already wrapped in its own filter, into this thing and tell it to brew 1 or 2 cups of joe. It doesn’t taste as good as the French Press, but it’s faster and easier to clean. The advent of the pre-flavored pods with some flavored creamer offsets the blandness of the coffee flavor a bit. It’s really excellent if I decide to have a quick cup with my breakfast before work.

Now, my latest discovery, is the self-heating canned coffee. So far, I’ve only tried the French Vanilla latte flavor… And it is quite bland. Too much milk for my tastes. But how in the hell can you beat this product in the convenience department? You pull a can lid off the bottom, pop a plastic container to create a chemical reaction, and wait 5 minutes… And it’s literally too hot for me to drink. I picked up a 4-pack for $4, so it’s a bargain compared to other “on-the-run” coffee solutions (like Starbucks).

The self-heating can is designed by a California company called OnTech. It apparently took them 7 years and $24 million to perfect the design. Presumably, more products will follow and, hopefully, these products will taste better. I can see oatmeal, soup, hot cocoa, and even melted chocolate for dipping being quite a success.

To all who are subscribed to the rss feed of my blog, please re-subscribe. I started routing the feed through FeedBurner.com. One of the new features of the feed is that it will auto-splice in a daily summary of my del.icio.us bookmarks. Here’s the new feed url:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/GlobalReset

If you don’t know what I’m talking about and what it means to subscribe to a feed, I suggest you check out BlogLines (my favorite online news aggregator). Just click the ”sub bloglines” button at the top of the sidebar there.

The premise of ALL LOOK SAME is to test whether or not anyone can actually tell the difference between Chinese, Japanese, or Koreans. I’ve boasted, on occasion, that I could tell the difference. I never thought I could tell 100% of the time. But, after taking this test, I’m not so sure I can pick the correct race better than flipping a coin would. Maybe body language and clothing style help in some cases to raise my success in the real world, but I usually don’t get a “correct/incorrect” feedback from folks on the street. Take the test and let me know how you do…