Garrick van Buren – Page 112 – About time. And product. And being more deliberate.

First Crack 105. Coffee Review – Grand Cru Kenya: Mamuto, Kirinyaga

This podcast kicks off a new monthly coffee review series at the First Crack Podcast.

This month, I’m reviewing: George Howell’s Terroir Coffee: Kenya Mamuto Kirinyaga

First, it took me a while to tweak the grinder back for a good press pot. In that time, the time was ticking on the coffee itself. Lesson learned for February.

This is a great bean, Andrew called it his favorite bean in the past 3 months. In the press pot I tasted heavy blueberry and banana notes with a trace of cherry and just a whiff of cocoa.

In the Mocha Brew, the cup was sharp and thin, very little flavor or mouthfeel. So, while I had two cups in front of me, I avoided that one.

Special thanks to my wife and Andrew Kopplin at Kopplin’s Coffee for inspiring this series and selecting this month’s coffee.

Listen to Coffee Review – Grand Cru Kenya: Mamuto, Kirinyaga [7 min].

Elsewhere:
CoffeeReview.com: Kenya Mamuto Kirinyaga – 96 points

Twitter Updates for 2008-01-20

just looked at flickrfan.org. Decided it’s not what I’m looking for. I want the same thing….just an arbitrary RSS feed, not tied to flickr #
wait, I was thinking too hard. iPhoto -> ‘Subscribe to Photocast’ . Then flip over to Front Row and let it ride. Now to change the music. #
all these cold weather football games might make me not only a football fan, but a Packer fan as well. No, I don’t want to talk about Faurve #
@arik reminds us – making To-Do Lists isn’t doing To-Dos cullect/5: http://culld.us/552793 #

Twitter Updates for 2008-01-19

http://cullect.com/65 proves that LOLcats is funnier when it’s in someone else’s reading list. 🙂 #
reading the FeedBurner API finding it more inspiring than the FaceBook API. #
-13F, first day of swimming lessons for the boy. #

Twitter Updates for 2008-01-18

@geniodiabolico – from articles I already have, and anything that comes in on going. @cullect gets new feeds from new subscriptions. #
Did you know @cullect has a built-in url shortener (a la tinyurl)? – http://culld.us, an example: http://culld.us/540074 #
@DeRushaJ, I agree. It’d be great if the response was more approachable, but, we all (you, me, big brands) have our quirks. #
@DeRushaJ – I watched the theater price Good Question tonight. The question was good. Was there an answer? #
is watching the mercury drop. down 3 degrees F since I work up. Fun! #

Twitter Updates for 2008-01-17

@geniodiabolico, great post. #
@geniodiabolico, I’ve amused myself by saying, "advertisers, audience, publication, remove 1 an you’ve got something interesting." #
@brownorama – and in exactly the same way. #

Eight Stupid Things

Bex asked me for 8 things;

I took the left-brain/right-brain dominance test Bex referenced and it said I, “you focus on details until they manifest themselves in a unique pattern and only then work with the ‘larger whole'” and recommended I be a design consultant. 🙂
Climatically, I’m the most comfortable between 42°N and 52°N. I don’t know about S.
I long for a day when the Beatles won’t be overexposed.
The smell of sage reminds me of The 24 Hour Christmas Flu.
Reading to my son reminds me of high school forensics
My first reaction to not finding something quickly: eliminate all the clutter
I only recently came to terms with the number of books I own that I’ve never read.
My comfort in leaving things unread extend to feeds. But you already knew that. 🙂

Twitter Updates for 2008-01-16

is pretty sure ‘looming recession’ doesn’t actually exist. Like predicting the weather 6 mnths out. Sure, winters are colder than summers. #
@cullect stat-o-the-day: 703 recommendations, 4140 feeds, 497086 items #
couldn’t sleep, got outta bed just to buy a domain name for a crazy @cullect spinoff idea. #
@jamuraa – yes, breaking is helpful. Can you elaborate on what happened? I don’t see anything odd in the logs. #
is re-installing Acrobat Reader. This isn’t improving my impression of Adobe. #
@fred_beecher – I completely agree. Unfortunately, a couple of vendors I have don’t feel the same. #
@jamuraa – ok. I got a peak at the issue you were having, filed the bug report and killed all the offenders. #

Cullect.com – You Already Have An Account

If you’ve spent significant time online, you have pile of names and passwords. Typically, one per domain, sometimes, it’s more than that. Each web service assuming it’s so god damn important in your life that it deserves a special password one more unmemorable than the next.

Highly rude, impolite, an unnecessary. Especially today when so many web services have interoperable APIs.

What do websites ask people to register instead of simply authenticate?
One reason is that ad-rates, valuations, and other finance-related metrics are based on the number of accounts (active or otherwise). Things unimportant to the people registering.

For Cullect.com, I needed some unique identifier. Something small to distinguish one person from another. As an added bonus, I’m betting the people in need of a powerful feed aggregator like Cullect are already publishing to some kind of API-enabled website already.

Cullect authenticates you against your own existing website(s). Easy. Like looking in the mirror.

No registration process. Just sign in. No need to create a new account or password. If you want to save yourself a step on the publishing side, Cullect can save your password. By default, it doesn’t.

For more background on this approach, check out my Guarding the Rhino post.

Twitter Updates for 2008-01-15

caught up in @cullect after being in under the weather yesterday. Wow, that went quick. #
@jamuraa – that’s the same as asking for an FM receiver in an iPod. #
spoooooky what I wrote almost 2 years to the date: http://tinyurl.com/24q7a8 #

Cullect.com – We Read Through Each Other

A couple days ago, Arik Jones – one of the early people in Cullect.com – deleted all his feeds and started over.

He dropped from ~50 feeds down to 4.

His dramatic shift got me thinking about the shared, collaborative, nature of Cullect.com and a notion I’ve been calling “reading through each other.”

Within Cullect, if a post (let’s call it ‘Commenting Post’) in a feed you subscribe to links to another post (‘Original Post’) from a feed you aren’t subscribed to, you can read ‘Original Post’ inline with ‘Commenting Post’ (instead of opening another tab or window).

That’s what I had originally deemed the ‘reading through’ notion.

Back to Arik.

Within Cullect, everyone’s reading list is public. Pick a number, any number. You don’t have to be a curator of that ‘Cullection’ to read. So, you could find a couple Cullections that have most of the feeds you like and some decent curators and drop all your overlapping feeds. Read the /recommended feeds from those Cullections, and start your own Cullection with just your unique feeds.

I don’t know if that’s what Arik did, but it’s not only another way to ‘read through’, but also a way to drive uniqueness in Cullections and save time in reading feeds. Both of which are exactly why I build Cullect.com

If you’ve been waiting to try it out, your first Cullection is now free. Just sign in and import your feeds.

Arik responds:

“I needed focus and I wanted to focus on a subject I do not know very much about….So thank you Cullect (and Garrick Van Buren) for making content comfortably consumable again.”

Excellent point Arik, it’s very easy to start a new Cullection, independent from your other feeds that focuses on a highly specific topic.