The last hold-out in the Twin Cities commercial ‘alternative’ radio dial succumbed to Love today. “Every mini-van driving soccer mom with a 15 year old will be pleased as punch when she turns on her radio and hears this festival of shit pouring forth from her speakers.” – Sornie Two choices remain; The Current, or …
Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
Ear Travel Tip
This is a note to self: take a decongestant pill an hour before before take-off and landing. How Stuff Works says it’ll minimize earaches, nausea, and headache. The former has been the cause of some of my worst flying experiences. The latter 2 I’ve got right now. Unpleasant. Update: My mom said when I was …
Planting Flowers for a Walled Garden
Peter Fleck is asking about content guidelines for Minneapolis’ wireless portal. My initial thoughts….. Some of you may know I worked on a similar project (same idea, but in the private sector) back around 2000. All the problems we struggled with then are non-existant now (syndication formats, wireless equipment, etc). Since the U of M’s …
First Crack 99. Jeremy Raths and the Search for Extraordinary Coffee
We catch up with Twin Cities coffee legend Jeremy Raths and talk about: Moving The Roastery from a coffee shop in the middle of St. Paul to delivering coffee from an abandon convent. The history of the speciality coffee market – nationally and locally. How the coffee market is changing to benefit the small, local, …
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Make Me
“I’m what’s next baby! I don’t need them to tell me that, and I sure as hell ain’t gonna pay them to tell me that.” – Chuck Olsen Which would you choose; Paying money to site quietly in a chair while someone reads PowerPoint slides and makes your chosen profession sound lame, boring, pointless. Chasing …
First Crack 100. How to Cup Coffee with Jeremy Raths
Jeremy Raths, from The Roastery, teaches us how to cup – the traditional process for tasting and choosing coffee. He walks through: The cupping process How he teaches others how to cup The need to be emotionally self-aware when cupping How to get the cupping experience at home The responsibility and integrity of a good …
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Two Rooms – Both Closed
Reviewing some year old files, I saw a note on the “third place”, TwoRooms.net. Their idea was to combine a temporary office space and childcare. Great concept. Alas, like Gate3 before them, TwoRooms is no longer. Either there’s demand for a temporary office space thing and maintenance is really hard or there’s no demand. I’m …
How To Deploy Rails with SVN and Capistrano to a Secondary Domain on TextDrive
I just deployed my first rails app to one of my secondary domains on TextDrive’s shared hosting space. If that sounds like a recipe for disaster….you’re right! While Rails is a great development tool, there’s lots of work to do in simplifying, stabilizing, and documenting the deployment process. The app in question is very, very …
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Only Do
“We are not good at knowing, we are not good at planning, we are not good at forecasting, we are only good at doing.” – Nassim Taleb, author The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
A First Step
“…take 100 great journalists, give them small HD camcorders and laptops and say ‘here’s your camera, there’s the door….They could upload their stories and feed them to a web site, 24 hours a day…..and it would not cost all that much…say we paid each of our 100 reporters, $140,000 a year. Where would you get …