Save time ordering your morning coffee

We all hate waiting in line for our morning coffee, but maybe not as much as we hate messing with our own coffee pots. So here is 10 tips on how to get your coffee just about one-thousand times faster.

1. Order your morning espresso like you you’re in the army. Drink. Temperature. Size. Custom instructions. Don’t make the barista ask you questions, which will add seconds on to your order.

2. Don’t be on a cell phone. Seriously. It’s rude, makes everybody wait, and could get you a mediocre coffee. The service you serve is the service you’ll get.

3. If you don’t recognize the barista, don’t ask for your regular coffee. Not all barista’s know your drink by heart, and many work all different shifts and have a hard time remembering everyone’s drink.

4. Order all your drinks up front. Then the barista can group tasks together and make only one trip if she has to get anything. If you are still deciding on a last drink, let the barista know that.

5. Order loudly enough. It seems strange, but a lot of sound is lost through the gap between the windows.

6. Order from the driver’s seat if you’re at a drive through. It is hard to hear the passenger order, so if the passenger wants something, the driver should be the messenger.

7. If your friend’s drink sounds good, get the same thing the same way. It is faster to get doubles of something than different things: less explanation to coworkers, double the milk, few trips to get things, repetitive motion.

8. Personal mugs. Please have them ready and cleaned out.

9. Have your money ready. I’m not saying you have to add up your order in your head (which is helpful), but just have bills or card ready.

10. Punch card? Have that ready too.

So say that by doing each one of those things saves only one second, then you’ve saved yourself, and everyone behind you, 10 seconds. For six people in line for their morning coffee, that’s a minute. And, realistically, each one of those things takes more than a second. People, lets start changing the world, one cup at a time.

The little blog that could

This is a sad day for this poor blog. The term has finished and Online Marketing is no more.

But that doesn’t mean that this blog is no more. It will be turned into something and that something is

BIG REVEAL

I don’t know yet. As far as I know it will be about coffee and writing (how wonderfully cliché) and the book publishing program. Enjoy.

Expect a new title and images soon. We gotta SEO up this bee-zee.

Time Travel: Publishing 10 Years from Now

So, what is the world of publishing going to look like in 10 years? I don’t know for sure, but I have a few ideas.

There will be a standard e-reader format. And it will be Apple. Sorry Kindle lovers (who knows? Maybe Kindle will run on the Apple platform then). Apple is just so darn sexy, how can consumers help it? Apple runs their music; iPod has become the household name for MP3 player like Kleenex is for nose tissue and BandAid is for bandages. And just like there are different sizes of iPod, books will be read on different sizes of book players, from iPad to iPod to iPhone. I will read mine on my iPhone.

There will still be print books because my mom buys them by the truckload. She consumes those things like pirated TV shows, except that she spends a fortune. Her cohorts do the same, so I imagine that veracious readers of a certain babyboom-shaped demographic are going to want their printed books.

The printed book will last at least as long as the babyboomers, and at least as long as there is Christmas. EBooks make terrible gifts. Square, physical books are easy to wrap and make the giver feel like they are giving something of substance. Printed books are here to stay.

There will be major restructuring in the big publishing houses. Some might collapse, but this economy isn’t great for industries that already have small profit margins, especially when they can’t buffer sales with strong backlists or academic sales. Right now, they’re coughing up blood by focusing on this minute’s bestseller, but like the shallow blockbuster movie fad, people are going to get tired of cheap thrills. There’s going to be a literary backlash felt through the big houses, while the literature is being produced by small publishers, like the movie industry with the resurgence of independent films. Then it will cycle back through when indie becomes mainstream (ie Away We Go).

And I might be there. I might be your boss. I might bring you coffee. Or I might just sell out.

Time will tell.

Can math change your life too?

The last post was for the assignment for the online marketing course to write about some literature that changed my life. But it isn’t just literature that changes me. I may have majored in creative writing but I minored in mathematics. There is something about the way that math works that illuminates my life in a similar way that literature does.

So I’d like to tell you the short version of that the summer before I began college where I took a seminar class on String Theory at Cambridge University. I learned the mathematics of these strings, but what I remember most is not the technical stuff, but that strings break down what it means to be.

Atoms can be broken into protons, neutrons, electrons, into the pieces of those, the quarks and other subatomic particles. To cut again, infinitely small with the razor blade of God, to when there is nothing more to divide, there are strings. These strings are not made of matter, they are energy, and lots of these energies make up everything.

Professor Yves’ first language was Dutch, and he was soft spoken. I sat front row to hear him, to see the curves of integration on the chalkboard, the 12 dimensions of space when I can only wrap my head around the standard four. What would it even mean to be a part of dimension seven?

“Nothing,” he said. “You are in it, and you can’t even feel it. It is like this.” He snapped his fingers. “And not like that, because even that is too much.”

This math explodes my definition of religion, what God is, because if God is energy then he can be these strings and make up everything. Or these strings, which governed the Big Bang, Yves said, could be God, and God could have exploded the universe to expand infinitely.

To see a graph stretch towards positive and negative infinity could be the stretch of time, back for forever and forward for forever.

Comma, Comma, Comma

Literature that changes my life does so in bits and pieces. I think about the papers I wrote as an undergrad, and that I may not have gotten an A-plus-plus on them, but that I still think about “The Sounds of Shakespeare” and comparing and contrasting Jimmie Santiago Bacca, a prison poet, with Billy Collins. These papers on poetry changed the way I think.

So lets talk poetry. It is not just the poems, but the dialog that surrounds them. Take “Death be not Proud” by John Donne. It isn’t the poem that changed my life, but the way it was placed within the drama W;t. In W;t, the protagonist Vivian Bearing, a foremost scholar on John Donne, and who is dying of cancer, recalls an old conversation she had with a professor over her own not so A-plus-plus paper. The argument was over a semicolon in the line

“And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.”

The professor argued that scholars believed Donne had meant there to be a comma in the place of the semicolon. Vivian argued that the copy the library had available contained the semicolon. All of the copies in the library at my undergraduate university contained the semicolon as well. The professor insisted on the comma because a comma is but a breath, whereas the semicolon is the closest thing to a full stop without actually becoming a period. The comma is the barest breath between life and death, the barest transition from one existence to the next; it is the reason why W;t is W;t and not Wit.

This changed my life in two ways. The first was the way I punctuated. Before, punctuation had been a mechanical feature of my writing. I used periods because they were socially acceptable ends to sentences. Now I consider the poetic nature those little marks and use them consciously and not because my high school teachers evaluated me on writing mechanics.

The second change occurred a while after I studied the poem and play in class. The spring after I studied W;t, my friend Amy was diagnosed with cancer, and she was gone just a few months later. Like that.. She was a full spirit, an old soul, and she was gone without the full pause of a semicolon. I think of Donne’s comma and how just like that friends and family are gone. Just like that, I’ll be gone too.

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more, death, thou shalt die.

Brew to Bikes Keywords

These are the keywords from the previous post on Brew to Bikes.

Brew to Bikes
Portland
Local Business
Artisan Economy
Microbrew
Indie Media
Fashion Designers
Urban Planner
Artisan Home and Garden

iPad vs Kindle: I Don’t Want Another Device

I go out to eat conveyor belt sushi a lot. And the last time I was there I saw a man at the belt using his chopsticks correctly, drinking wine, and reading a Kindle: a great stereotype of the Kindle reader. If I had a Kindle, that’s probably what I would do with it too—read on the go. I would read it at the gym, on the bus, waiting for a doctor’s appointment, or maybe even at home. If I were still an undergrad, I would love to have all my textbooks on the Kindle so that my backpack wouldn’t be so heavy and so that I wouldn’t forget to bring my book to class all the time.

Although, if that were how the Kindle would function for me, then I don’t know if I even want it. It would be just one more device that I would try to shove into my purse—forget the backpack, I’m not an undergrad anymore—and god knows I can barely snap it shut right now. I don’t even think I could fit the 7 ½”x5”x7” Kindle in there. Then what about the iPad when it comes out? I’d need to cram that in there too.

The thing is, I already have an iPhone that reads books. It also plays music and makes calls, wakes me up in the morning, and can stream videos from NBC. I pay extra for the Internet on it, and I don’t want to pay another $200 plus books for a Kindle, or upwards to $500 for the iPad and a separate Internet fee on top of that. I just want my one piece of hardware that I am investing all my money into that can do all the things I want. Kindles and iPads are neat, but really, I don’t want them.