jamesg

As I await to get to Chicago — the city that is likely to become an unexpected overnight stopover in my journey toward Des Moines — I realized I don’t quite know how to feel.

We spoke about the world changing. The cab driver and I. He said he felt the world is not the same as it was when he grew up. Progress. We spoke about rural and urban; city and countryside. Then, he started talking about change in the context of philosophy.

I am writing a blog post every day from December 1st to December 24th, 2021, about a blogger whose writing or site I follow. My aim for this series is to help you discover new blogs and to help get the word out about content creators whose blogs I appreciate. You can read more about this series in the inaugural Day 1 post.

I write this blog to help me learn about specialty coffee. In many of my posts, I share advice, recipes, and techniques from my own learning. This got me thinking about how professionals teach people coffee skills. I decided to reach out to Millie (@thatgirlfromthecafe on Instagram) to ask a few questions about what it is like to train people in basic coffee skills.

(Not in any way affiliated with the renowned Fun with Flags, hosted by Dr. Sheldon Cooper.)

I've been a fan of '90s sitcoms for years and whenever I am looking for something to watch one of three names comes up: Seinfeld, Cheers, and Frasier. My personal favorite is Frasier but I am presently taking a year-or-so break from watching the show so that, one day, I can go back and watch it and feel like I don't know everything that has already happened. That is my hope.

I have been attracted to coffee shops for a long time. When I was young, I enjoyed going out for a cup of tea with members of my family. I still think back to the days when I was too young to drink tea. I'd drink a carton of apple juice or something similar. I'd think about when I would be able to drink tea. I cannot remember at what age I could finally drink tea. I do know that tea stuck with me for years. I'd drink a few cups a day on most days.

I recently watched the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, as part of my pseudo-marathon of watching high school teen romance movies. I am toward the end of the top recommendations now, contemplating what movie I should watch next. The song I Want You to Want Me by Cheap Trick, and whose version for the movie was sung by Letters for Cleo, was played in the movie. Moments after the song came on, I thought to myself

I was preparing to make a cup of coffee and I suddenly got the urge to listen to Gloria by The Lumineers. I obliged, opening Spotify to play the track. Gloria was one of those songs that I listened to on repeat. The music, the rhythm, the accompanying Ballad of Cleopatra video together made for engaging musical and dramatic experience.

My LLM chatbot is instructed to only reference sources that are provided in the prompt I send to OpenAI. This is essential because I want answers to reflect what I have written rather than more general facts available to ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo. One of my primary considerations when developing my LLM chatbot was to ensure that, where possible, the sources of claims were cited. I devised two methods that, combined, provide both myself and users with information about sources associated with a question:

Earlier today, I was playing around with OpenAI's new ChatGPT model. I have thus far asked ChatGPT what coffee is, how to boil a kettle, what microformats are, and what the IndieWeb is. I thought I'd share the result I got for the prompt

Editor's note: I am starting a new series on this blog. Every so often, I'm going to feature an interview with a coffee blogger. In these interviews, I want to learn about how other coffee bloggers approach their work, and how they go from an idea to a final post.

Catherine Franks, the founder of Steampunk Coffee, recently wrote a blog post about complex and mellow espressos and coffees. The premise was at Steampunk they offer two espresso options and Cath took some time to explain what you could expect by choosing each option and why Steampunk offers two options. Essentially, one coffee on offer is more complex than the other. The coffee that is less complex—mellow—is one that pairs well with milk.

As a young child, I used to love waking up early in the morning. Catching the early bird, as it were. I think my waking up early was in part fuelled by the seemingly boundless energy that I had as a child. A feeling of excitement about the little things; the butterflies that would precede special occasions weeks in advance.

Earlier this week, I evaluated whether I should create a Fun with Words series on this blog in which I talk about interesting and amusing words and phrases ^1. I was looking through my open tabs in Firefox on my phone and saw an idea for a Fun with Words theme: jargon in computer science comprised of two words that are not usually next to each other. Specific? Yes indeed. Fun? Yes!

I am working my way through reading a blog post by Peter Molnar where he talks about his project to retrieve his old websites. [1] Reading through this post has me thinking, again, about how I can archive my internet presence.

I was walking past a familiar park yesterday when I saw the sun beam on the trees in such a way where the trees appeared almost golden. There were leaves falling down, slowly. On the ground, leaves blew around. I heard the occasional crunch as leaves ran along the concrete of the street on which I was walking. I looked back and admired the trees, in awe of how beautiful the light made them.

When I see a piano that is unplayed, I feel jarred. An instrument from which you can make music, quiet. I wonder: there could be music here, but there isn't. There's nobody there to play. At the same time, I feel like the sound of music may cheer people up; surprise them, make them think, give them a little moment of joy. That, and my love of playing piano, is why I like to play music in public, at pianos that you will often find in train stations and airports.

With firm roots in history, Canary Girl Coffee Company is based not only on good coffee but also on promoting the contributions of women who played an important role in roasting coffee. Through the colourful brand, coffees named after women, and the stories of those women featured on the Canary Girl website, this roaster stands out from so many with whom I have spoken.

A few days ago, I released a coffee ratio calculator on this blog. The ratio calculator lets you figure out the simplest version of a coffee to water ratio. You can also figure out how much coffee you need to use to brew with a particular ratio and a certain amount of water, or you can figure out how much water you need to brew with a particular ratio and amount of coffee.

Over the last few months, I have spent quite a bit of time learning about the Scottish coffee industry. I know many cafes and roasteries in Scotland and I have even interviewed many people who own coffee businesses in Scotland. Alongside my learning about the Scottish coffee industry, I have ordered from various roasters as I have needed coffee. I like to explore new roasters as I often find interesting coffees sold by roasters from whom I do not regularly order.

What do you hear when you go into a coffee shop? This question came to mind earlier today as I sat in my local coffee shop. I have entertained this question before after discussing how the sensory experience of coffee is much greater than just taste. Making coffee involves all of your senses, from touch to sight. Consuming coffee involves sight, hearing, smelling, and of course tasting. There's even more to the experience of coffee than just the basic senses but I digress.

I am writing a blog post every day from December 1st to December 24th, 2021, about a blogger whose writing or site I follow. My aim for this series is to help you discover new blogs and to help get the word out about content creators whose blogs I appreciate. You can read more about this series in the inaugural Day 1 post.

Over the holidays, I spent some time removing post types from my site in favour of publishing notes. Notes are short posts. So far, I have used notes to share my morning coffee, to ask about movies like The Matrix series, and more. I like being able to publish notes that are unstructured and free flow. Most of my thoughts are not long enough to turn into a blog post, even if they are something I would like to share.

A member of the IndieWeb community, jeremycherfas.net, informed me that the text on my blog posts was hard to read. This was interesting because I pay a lot of attention to making sure content on my site is readable. Jeremy made me aware of something that I had not considered in the design of my blog post pages: the line width.

I use dark mode extensively across the web and indeed across my computer. The editor in which I am writing this blog post, Typora, is set up with a dark mode theme. My Ubuntu desktop has a dark mode theme. When I see the option to enable dark mode, I like to enable it. Anecdotally, I find dark mode easier on the eyes than bright modes.

My front-end web projects start as a HTML file, gradually expanding into JavaScript and CSS files as required. A few months ago, I found there was a way to auto-populate the boilerplate HTML code that gives the basic structure for a page in Visual Studio Code: the html, head, body tags, as well as some accompanying meta information in the head tag. When I first saw this feature, I was excited. I could save some time by using this! But, I could not recall how I triggered the code expansion.

For the first time in months, I attended the London / Europe IndieWeb Homebrew Website Club. I have enjoyed attending these events in the past because they bring together people who are doing interesting things with the web to varying extents. In the last meeting, we covered everything from digital music quality to digital copyright to printing one's blog. The topic of printing one's blog is one I would like to dive into further.

I am writing a blog post every day from December 1st to December 24th, 2021, about a blogger whose writing or site I follow. My aim for this series is to help you discover new blogs and to help get the word out about content creators whose blogs I appreciate. You can read more about this series in the inaugural Day 1 post.

I change the emojis next to my website name in the top right corner of my website and on my home page during certain events. This December, I changed the coffee emoji to a snowflake. During the month of Halloween, I changed the emoji to a pumpkin. I enjoyed making these changes manually, but I would regularly forget to change the emoji back to a coffee mug after an event was over. That is why you may have noticed my website showed a pumpkin emoji until the end of November (!).