Bibliomancer.Com

I like to think of myself as a pretty savvy guy, with a decent edu­ca­tion, a good job and a good under­stand­ing of tech­nol­ogy. This is well and good, but I think all of those things have con­tributed to the odd­ness of some­thing I haven’t done in a while.

This morn­ing, I clipped coupons.

It shouldn’t be that odd — it’s some­thing I did grow­ing up, and con­tin­ued to do after col­lege when my income was on the painful side. I think I stopped when I moved to Cal­i­for­nia. There were new gro­cery stores (that sold liquor) and I was mak­ing bet­ter money than I ever had before, so it seemed kind of unnec­es­sary. I fell out of the habit.

Now, in recent years I’ve got­ten my finan­cial habits under much bet­ter con­trol. Paid off credit card debt, stayed within my means, saved, invested, all that jazz. I am per­haps not as fru­gal as I could be, but all in all I run a pretty tight ship. So, given that it was inter­est­ing to me when, in the midst of all the bad finan­cial news, a lit­tle switch flipped and said “get the coupons today”.

As pan­ics go, I feel like that’s pretty restrained, but what scares me a lit­tle is that the behav­ior is bad in the big scope. I’m not entirely sure thrift is con­sis­tent with the needs of the econ­omy in its cur­rent form. What I’m not sure of is whether that’s a strike against thrift or a strike against the economy.

The finan­cial cri­sis is no triv­ial mat­ter, no one would argue oth­er­wise, but I can’t help but note how much it offends some peo­ple I know and think about it a lit­tle. Some of it is nor­mal indig­na­tion, some of it is per­sonal inter­est in the impact this has, but what’s curi­ous is that I think no small part of it is hurt pride.

I know a lot of engi­neers and technology-oriented peo­ple. These are smart peo­ple, smart enough that it often makes for a bit of a chip on their shoul­der. They have strong opin­ions on pol­i­tics, but usu­ally with a cer­tain bit of dis­dain, as if mere politi­cians are not really smart enough to under­stand things.

The finan­cial cri­sis takes a ham­mer to this because of it’s sheer com­plex­ity. These very smart peo­ple are obliged to face the fact that peo­ple in non-engineering fields might be smart too. Actu­ally smart, not just touchy-feely emo­tion­ally smart. That the sources of these prob­lems are some­thing they can­not under­stand cuts to a pretty pri­mal nerve.

I think it’s a good thing. Geeks are pretty com­pla­cent, even if they’re highly ver­bal and argu­men­ta­tive. Hav­ing these smart peo­ple get inter­ested in and pos­si­bly even respect­ful of the intel­li­gence required for other fields could be a great boon on so many levels.

I just fin­ished Atul Gawande’s Bet­ter on a friend’s rec­om­men­da­tion, and I owe that friend a drink (or per­haps one of those ter­ri­fy­ing japan­ese sodas she likes).

Bet­ter‘s sub­ti­tle is “A surgeon’s notes on per­for­mance”, and that speaks directly to the hook. Gawande is a sur­geon, and that fact shapes his per­spec­tives and argu­ments as he makes the case that improve­ment comes from three main vec­tors: dili­gence, doing right and inge­nu­ity. These are the three sec­tions of his book, and each sec­tion is com­posed of a num­ber of accounts which reflect the premise.

The sec­tion on dili­gence opens strong with the mun­dane seem­ing issue of hand wash­ing. While it’s an inter­est­ing study on san­i­ta­tion and infec­tion, it is even more inter­est­ing as a por­trait of how to go about solv­ing a relent­lessly mun­dane prob­lem in a large scale envi­ron­ment. That focus on the mun­dane and prac­ti­cal dri­ves the other two sec­tions, one on a mas­sive immu­niza­tion cam­paign in India and the other on U.S. Army bat­tle­field med­i­cine, and the ways in which it has improved. While the nom­i­nal thread of these three is dili­gence, I would say the key­word is really logistics.

The next sec­tion, doing right, wan­ders the map a lit­tle bit, from mal­prac­tice, to doctor’s salaries, to how med­i­cine is priced, to the death penalty (and the role of doc­tors in it) . This is, to my mind, the weak­est sec­tion, but this prob­a­bly speaks to my bias as a reader. I am less inter­ested in the doctor’s per­spec­tive than I am in what it can tell me, so issues that are so strongly inter­nal to the pro­fes­sion were not what I was look­ing for.

The last sec­tion, inge­nu­ity, had been the one that had caught my inter­est, as I had been told about some of the find­ings about the treat­ment of cys­tic fibro­sis, and I was curi­ous to read more. This is where he absolutely knocks it out of the park, and these are the sto­ries I’ll be think­ing about for weeks.

First, he talks about the his­tory of child­birth and med­i­cine, and how deadly the process has been. This is inter­est­ing enough, but it takes a turn for the fas­ci­nat­ing when he talks about the devel­op­ment of the Apgar score, a sim­ple numeric rat­ing of the health of a baby, taken one minute and five min­utes after birth. In a mag­nif­i­cent exam­ple of get­ting what you mea­sure for, the cre­ation of a met­ric helped drive suc­cess by giv­ing some­thing to judge it against — how many chil­dren below a cer­tain score can you save?

Next he talks about the treat­ment of cys­tic fibro­sis and the bell curve. The kicker is this — when data became trans­par­ent, it became clear that there was a bell curve of out­comes in dif­fer­ent treat­ment cen­ters, with some vastly out­per­form­ing oth­ers. What’s more, when that data became avail­able to all prac­ti­tion­ers, they could look at the best prac­tices of those best units and improve their own per­for­mance, thus improv­ing the over­all average.

Left at that, this would be a sim­ple tri­umph of the virtues of trans­parency, but what gets very inter­est­ing is what hap­pens next. Yes, the over­all aver­age improves, but the great­est improve­ment comes from the top group, not the bot­tom. Their improve­ment is so pro­found that the gap between the best and aver­age becomes almost insur­mount­able. It seems those groups who were already on the look­out for any way they could improve applied that same drive to tak­ing advan­tage of the new information.

The final bit, on doctor’s in India kind of ties it all together, and while it’s an illus­tra­tion of a lot of the points in the book, one par­tic­u­lar bit struck me, that these doc­tors in these some­times ter­ri­ble con­di­tions still felt they had some­thing to con­tribute to the wider med­ical world. That belief did not seem unfounded, but it also seemed that it was pos­i­tively self-fufilling.

The book’s after­ward, mag­nif­i­cently titled “How to be a Pos­i­tive Deviant,” is com­posed of five sim­ple points to fol­low, and it is prob­a­bly the best such advice I’ve seen for the brilliant-yet-not-so-functional since Scott Berkun’s sec­tion on office pol­i­tics in The Art of Project Management (Now titled, Mak­ing Things Hap­pen).

This is a book I would sug­gest to any­one who needs to do things which are big­ger than them­selves. While the premise may be med­ical, the bulk of the book is clearly applic­a­ble to almost any endeavor which requires dili­gence, judge­ment and ingenuity.

I stopped by Sta­ples today to pick up some paper for my new printer (a Brother HL-5250DN, which I am very happy with) and took a lit­tle bit of time look­ing at the plan­ners. Now, I had actu­ally been look­ing to find a case that would suit the iPDA, and had no luck on that front, but I did make a curi­ous dis­cov­ery — the 2009 Action Day Plan­ner.

I should also note that that label is set up in a band across the mid­dle of the plan­ner, which is black and closes with an elas­tic strap, so that the whole visual effect is not unlike a mole­sk­ine. Com­pounded by the trade­mark dodg­ing “Get Things Done” it looked all the world like some­one had decided to knock off the cur­rent hot­ness of per­sonal pro­duc­tiv­ity and sell it through Staples.

It turns out that impres­sion was pretty much right.

Now, I should note that this plan­ner files the ser­ial num­bers off a num­ber of very good ideas, and as such it’s actu­ally a pretty well designed plan­ner. The lay­out is func­tional, (one week spread over two pages, with room for sep­a­rate types of lists) and the intro­duc­tion is more detailed than the aver­age day run­ner, so in and of itself, it’s a decent lit­tle book.

How­ever, if you have any famil­iar­ity with Get­ting Things Done or Franklin Covey, the intro­duc­tion promises to be at least a lit­tle bit humor­ous, espe­cially when you get to the action flow chart, which begins with your “In Tray” and looks strangely familiar.

So, I went to their web­site, and there’s not a lot there. I appar­ently missed these guys in 2008, and it seems that they do have win­dows soft­ware, with an Out­look plu­gin for $23 (the price is not listed on the site). Since the David Allen prod­uct costs about three times that, I feel more secure in my impres­sion that this is really a generic prod­uct fill­ing a niche.

I admit to mixed feel­ing about that. One on hand, when the gener­ics start show­ing up, you know that a prod­uct has reached a cer­tain crit­i­cal mass. On the other, it can really end up mud­dy­ing the water for new and inter­est­ing prod­ucts. For com­par­i­son, I really like mole­sk­ines, but I feel like their suc­cess has lead to too much emu­la­tion and not enough new and inter­est­ing products.

For now this is just some­thing I found on the bot­tom shelf of a Sta­ples, and it may be noth­ing more than a flash in the pan, but it’s some­thing I’ll keep a curi­ous eye on.

For my birth­day, I received an Ipod Touch, which I have been using as a PDA (and iPDA, if you would). The release of the 2.0 firmware, and the new soft­ware capa­bil­i­ties this added to the machine was enough to drive me to make the leap.

So I’m two weeks in and it is so far the best PDA I have ever had, knock­ing out the pre­vi­ous con­tender, a Nokia n800. While the n8oo was more pow­er­ful (since it was effec­tively a small linux box) the iPDA sim­ply works more smoothly, has bet­ter soft­ware (with some spe­cific excep­tions) and is a vastly bet­ter media player too.

That said, there are a few lessons learned, and good and bad things that have come out of this that might be use­ful to peo­ple look­ing to go the same route.

Impres­sions

• I dropped an extra $20 on the fancy pants screen pro­tec­tor at the Apple store and I can only say this: Totally. Worth. It. An unfor­tu­nate col­li­sion with my keys has now marred the sur­face, but the dam­age is lim­ited to the screen pro­tec­tor, and that is much eas­ier for me to replace.
  
• More than any­thing the util­ity of iPDA is going to depend on how com­fort­able you are with the key­board. Per­son­ally, I like it, and the fact that it works with my over­sized thumbs is a big point in its favor, but it’s not like any other key­board I’ve ever played with. That means it may or may not be to your taste, and I really strongly sug­gest play­ing with one for a while — either a friends or one at an apple store — to see if it’s some­thing you think you could get used to. If you can’t, I would hon­estly say don’t bother get­ting one unless you want it for the media side. With­out the abil­ity to enter data com­fort­ably, you will quickly find that it is not a use­ful pda.
  
• If you are com­fort­able enter­ing data, you may find this has one ben­e­fit that other PDAs do not — you may want to carry it around. The util­ity of an iPod is some­thing you can come to take for granted, and in sit­u­a­tions where I might for­get my PDA, I still want to bring my audio­books. As some­one who has left many a PDA to gather dust in a drawer, this is huge.
  
• Be sure you really don’t want an iPhone. Even set­ting aside the phone com­po­nent and always-on con­nec­tiv­ity, the iPhone has a few fea­tures that the touch does not, notably the cam­era, GPS, a good exter­nal speaker, and a built in micro­phone. For me, Cam­era and GPS might be nice, but always-on con­nec­tiv­ity would mean I never turn the thing off, so I’m just fine with­out them. I do begrudge the speaker and the micro­phone though. I would love to be able to use it as a voice recorder or to trust that I won’t sleep through the puny alarm.
  
• In one of the more baf­fling bits of soft­ware, there are about a dozen third party to do list appli­ca­tions, some of which sync with web ser­vice, but none of which sync with the to do lists in ical. I have no idea if this is a prob­lem with apple’s sdk or with the list devel­op­ers, but it’s a gap I find highly annoy­ing.
  
• I don’t use it for work mail because our exchange install is suf­fi­ciently crotch­ety that I don’t want to risk it. But I do use it with gmail, and it works pretty much seamlessly.

Appli­ca­tions I use

• Appigo’s ToDo — Given the num­ber of free task lists, it may seem odd to have paid for one, but ToDo’s inter­face matches my per­sonal style of input. I would encour­age oth­ers to try out as many of the lists as they can and find the one that suits them best.
  
• Instapa­per — This is a web ser­vice that grabs inter­est­ing web pages for you with a click, and sets them aside for you to read later. I tried it on the web and quickly dis­carded ti in favor of other options. How­ever, the (free) app that sup­ports it has made me into a reg­u­lar user. When I find an inter­est­ing arti­cle, I just click the book­marklet and it gets saved. Then when I take the iPDA online I just free it up and it pulls down local copies of these arti­cles for me to read at my leisure.
  
• Net­NewsWire — I use net­newswire for my reg­u­lar RSS read­ing, so get­ting the iphone ver­sion was a no-brainer. Man­ag­ing mul­ti­ple loca­tions (I read only a frac­tion of my feeds on my iPDA that I do on my com­puter) took some get­ting used to, but it’s a fea­ture I love. Peo­ple who use google reader might look into using “Byline” for sim­i­lar pur­poses, but it will run you ten bucks.
  
• Times and Mobile News — As far as I can tell, a com­pany called Verve Wire­less has been com­ing up with a stan­dard plat­form for tak­ing news­pa­per dis­tri­b­u­tion wire­less. The New York Times and the AP seem to use the plat­form, and as a result are both pleas­antly easy to read when I’m online. I’d love a few more fea­tures, but they’re nicely util­i­tar­ian at the moment.
  
• Remote — Ok, this isn’t hugely pro­duc­tive, but turn­ing my iPDA into a remote for itunes is incred­i­bly handy. It would prob­a­bly be even cooler if I had an apple tv wid­get.
  
• Twit­terific — This is the app that makes me glad I don’t have an iphone. This is so per­fectly the medium for twit­ter that if I had full time con­nec­tiv­ity, I would prob­a­bly go down a very dark hole of tweets.

Where it falls short

• Seri­ously. How hard is it to sync to ical’s To Do list?
  
• If you go the iPDA route, you will be a sec­ond class cit­i­zen. The iPhone gets all the love, and some app devel­op­ers don’t even think about how their apps are going to work if you don’t have con­nec­tiv­ity. Other apps will be of lim­ited util­ity to you because they depend on func­tion­al­ity you don’t have, like a micro­phone or GPS. This does not mean you won’t have great stuff, but see­ing what you don’t have can hurt a lit­tle.
  
• The cases are all ter­ri­ble if you are not a teenager. I would not feel this way if I viewed this pri­mar­ily as a media player, but I’m using it as my pda, and is it so much to want a grown up case? I’m still look­ing for some­thing that can dou­ble as a wal­let so I can reduce the num­ber of things I have to carry, but I am frus­trated at every turn.
  
• Sync­ing files back and forth is still pretty weak. I cur­rently use file­mag­net to push doc­u­ments across to the iPDA, and it’s func­tional, but I can’t say more about it than that. The devel­oper has promised the usabil­ity is going to improve soon, and I look for­ward to that, but right now the offline doc­u­ment view­ing options require jump­ing through hoops.
  
• You appar­ently can’t talk about this with­out men­tion­ing that there’s no copy and paste. So there.
  
• There are a lot of apps and ideas that are more promise than deliv­ery at this point, so it’s impor­tant to remem­ber that this is a fairly imma­ture market.

Con­clu­sion

So, warts and all, the iPDA is hold­ing up very well indeed. It does every­thing I need with­out con­nec­tiv­ity, but then offers addi­tional fea­tures when there’s wire­less to be had. For me that’s about the right bal­ance — I don’t like depend­ing on con­nec­tiv­ity, but I don’t like it as an after­thought either. It’s also clear that this is an expe­ri­ence that is just going to get bet­ter and bet­ter with time, as the appli­ca­tions mature.

It’s worth not­ing that with the many options avail­able to me via the app store, I have not felt any need to jail­break my iPDA. Partly this is because if I was really con­cerned with get­ting into the guts of the device, I’d stick with the n800, but partly because I;m not sure what jail­break­ing offers me that I need. I sup­pose it would be nice to have an SSH client, I really don’t see that as being worth all the hassles.

I do admit that this def­i­nitely leaves me look­ing curi­ously at the iphone when my Ver­i­zon con­tract runs out. Are all these advan­tages (and the prospect of one less device in my pock­ets) enough to switch to a car­rier whose local ser­vice is spotty at best? Prob­a­bly not, but we’ll see.

So, Archi­tects Online mag­a­zine has an arti­cle about how five teams of archi­tects might rein­vent Star­bucks. It’s an inter­est­ing read (and also an illus­tra­tion of why flash slideshows make ter­ri­ble, er, illus­tra­tions) but the thing that’s intrigu­ing is that there’s a clear divide between the designs that go in two dif­fer­ent direc­tions. Two of them (nei­ther of which I can really clearly envi­sion) are all about slip­ping cof­fee dis­pens­ing into the land­scape, while the other three all have a com­mon theme of cre­at­ing more com­mon seat­ing, like a bar or a com­mu­nity kitchen.

That split is kind of fas­ci­nat­ing since it cuts right to the heart of what Star­bucks is. Are they a cof­fee shop, or are they the much bal­ly­hooed “Third Space”, that place that peo­ple can go that is not their home or work? It’s not sur­pris­ing that the designs that lean towards the lat­ter look more like bars, since that’s the clas­sic third space. Still, when I go to Star­bucks I admit I don’t see a lot of broad social­iza­tion. Small groups at tables, but mostly it’s indi­vid­u­als with their lap­tops (and most of those are going to Pan­era Bread these days). I’m not sure there’s a desire for true social­iza­tion as much as there is a desire for a place to go to be alone. With other people.

Dis­cov­ered via Brand Autopsy

Twit­ter is a curi­ous ser­vice. It obvi­ously has a lot of appeal, just judg­ing by the num­ber of peo­ple using it, but it’s always been a lit­tle hard to jus­tify. Con­ver­sa­tion tends towards the triv­ial, and the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of twit­ter as “blog­ging about what you had for lunch” has more than a bit of truth to it. Still, I use it (rdonoghue), and peo­ple some­times ask what the point of it is, so I like to have a bet­ter expla­na­tion than “it’s shiny”.

It’s actu­ally pretty easy to clar­ify in spe­cific sit­u­a­tions. If you have a prod­uct or ser­vice, it’s an excel­lent way to get infor­ma­tion out to inter­ested peo­ple. It’s a per­fect exam­ple of opt-in (dare I say, “per­mis­sion”) mar­ket­ing. The cus­tomer must take an active inter­est, so he only gets what he wants, but twit­ter — espe­cially if it’s already being used — makes the opt­ing in bar­rier triv­ial while still leav­ing the user feel­ing secure.

To really under­stand how pow­er­ful this is com­pare it to sign­ing up for email noti­fi­ca­tions. When you sub­mit your email address (which may require clear­ing other hur­dles) you start with a degree of appre­hen­sion that your address will be shared or lost, and you’ll get that much more spam. Even if there are no spam prob­lems, there’s a good chance that the email newslet­ters will be too fre­quent, irrel­e­vant, or so loaded with images and trash that they choke your inbox. Worse, if the day ever comes that you want to stop sub­scrib­ing, you are pretty much at their mercy. If their auto­mated unsub­scribe process works, that’s great, but if it doesn’t? It’s a huge headache. Even under the best of cir­cum­stances it’s one more piece of email to process, and a lot of us are already pretty swamped in that category.

On the other hand, con­sider send­ing those same noti­fi­ca­tions out via twit­ter. The opt in process is triv­ial and does not reveal any­thing about you except your own twit­ter id. You won’t be get­ting any tweets from any­one else and you can stop fol­low­ing the feed any time you want. Per­haps most impor­tantly, the char­ac­ter limit means that the mes­sage requires a lit­tle bit of thought, not just more graph­ics. Cer­tainly, that makes life harder for the broad­caster — brevity is harder than it looks — but it makes for more reward­ing communication.

That’s great if you’ve got a prod­uct or idea you’re sell­ing, but most peo­ple don’t. Unless you’ve really embraced the “you are your brand” phi­los­o­phy, twit­ter is a social avenue, not a mar­ket­ing one. So in what other con­text might twit­ter be useful?

I’ve occa­sion­ally made the case for the power of twit­ter in the work­place. For a team it pro­vides a fan­tas­tic view of what every­one is work­ing on at any given moment, and does so a lot more smoothly than vastly more expen­sive project man­age­ment soft­ware. I think that’s a great use for it, but it is a it lim­ited in scope. I’d never con­sid­ered it a big argu­ment in favor of twit­ter until yes­ter­day, when I dis­cov­ered it was only the tip of the iceberg.

A friend of mine works from home for a pretty big com­pany. She has a team that is spread across the U.S., and for for­mal com­mu­ni­ca­tions they have email, fancy phones, con­fer­enc­ing soft­ware and all the shini­est of tech­ni­cal toys. That works just fine for the major­ity of day to day busi­ness, but these tools work poorly for the kind of infor­mal com­mu­ni­ca­tions that comes from shar­ing an office with some­one. Sub­jects as sim­ple as how the week­end was or what a co-worker’s kids are up to don’t tend to work their way into for­mal com­mu­ni­ca­tion, but they’re the bread and but­ter of office com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and they’re some­thing that you miss out on when your team is remote or you work from home.

My friend and her team have started using twit­ter, and it’s really increased the sense that she’s work­ing with these other peo­ple. That may seem like a very small thing, but the sense of iso­la­tion is one of the hard­est parts of work­ing from home, and any­thing that breaks that up is a big deal.

(I sup­pose one might extrap­o­late some larger sense of iso­la­tion for peo­ple at large that explains twitter’s suc­cess, but that seems a bit facile.)

This is not to say that twit­ter is for every­one. It can be over­whelm­ing, and it’s very hard to strike a bal­ance between Metcalfe’s Law and Metcalfe’s Train Wreck. While it may seem triv­ial on the sur­face, this hope­fully illus­trates that it’s not lim­ited to shar­ing with the world that cute thing your cat just did.

I’ve installed the word­press app on my iPDA and just want to put it through the paces. The lim­i­ta­tions of the key­board is an obvi­ous lim­iter on its util­ity but it should work in a pinch.

Ok, so for those unfa­mil­iar with it, istockphoto.com is a site where one can buy clip art, pho­tographs and what­not for use in your projects. Along with stock.xchng, which I use for free images, it is one of the first places I go when­ever I have some par­tic­u­lar need for an image. I can’t say enough good things about itock­photo — I love the qual­ity of their prod­uct, I find their prices rea­son­able, I’m an absolute fanboy.

So, the lat­est issue of Before & After Mag­a­zine made men­tion of a fea­ture I was unaware of. They have a search func­tion that lets you search pho­tos by the places avail­able to put text, search by copy­space. This excited me, but it took me a while to find where the heck to do it (click advanced search, it’s in the lower right). This is a fan­tas­tic fea­ture, but while I was look­ing I found some­thing in the side­bar that I had never noticed before. A mag­i­cal link, full of promise and won­der, and it said:

Dol­lar Bin

Ok, so I admit I am from fru­gal New Eng­land stock. I am unable to resist look­ing through dis­count tables or bins hop­ing to find over­looked trea­sures. I have had occa­sional suc­cesses and fre­quent fail­ures, but hope springs eter­nal. When I saw that link it called me with a song I could not resist.

I’ll pretty much cut to the chase. I bought ten bucks worth of images that caught my eye and which look like some­thing I might some­day get some use out of. This is not prac­ti­cal, but man is it fun. There were some­thing like 2500 images in the dol­lar bin. Some of them, sure, were there for a rea­son (in at least a few cases because they’ve been used in enough places to join the ranks of rec­og­niz­able clip art), but the vast major­ity were high qual­ity and awesome.

Any­way, I know there aren’t a lot of folks who make reg­u­lar use of resource like this, but I also now a few who do might be read­ing, so let me just sug­gest that the dol­lar bin (though it’s more like a dol­lar thirty bin, the way cred­its are priced, but what­ever) is a great way to dip your toe in the clip art waters with­out get­ting too wet.

As an extra spe­cial bonus, I share a new font term I heard yes­ter­day: kem­ing. It means badly applied kern­ing, and it absolutely gave me a laugh.

I’m a giant cof­fee drinker. Enough to know that Star­bucks roasts are all two shades darker than they are any­where else, which makes the beans more con­sis­tent in their qual­ity, but also puts them in a cer­tain spec­trum of fla­vor. But not enough to let that keep me from drink­ing at Star­bucks when I need a cup. Cream and splenda cover a mul­ti­tude of sins.

I had been using a Cuisi­nart Grind & Brew for most of my coffee-making for quite some time. Now, the grind & brew is an impres­sive machine. In the­ory, you just drop in the beans, fill the reser­voir, hit a but­ton and it will grind the beans a brew the cof­fee right into a very nice ther­mal carafe that will keep your cof­fee hot all day. In prac­tice, the ther­mal crafe part is really, really good, but the rest of it is ter­ri­ble. See, there’s this core engi­neer­ing prob­lem — the grinder and bean hop­per are above the carafe, so when you make cof­fee, steam flows up through them. This turns any cof­fee dust from the blade grinder (yes, it’s a blade, for those that it mat­ters to) into a sort of brown paste which needs to be cleaned imme­di­ately or it will set and make your life mis­er­able. SInce clean­ing requires dis­as­sem­bling the whole thing, it more or less coun­ter­bal­ances all of the con­ve­nience of the all in one device, with annoy­ance to spare.

So, as a brief aside, these look great, they seem like fan­tas­tic gifts for peo­ple who like cof­fee, and I know a lot of peo­ple have made gifts of them with all good inten­tions. Before that hap­pens to you, please, heed my warn­ing and get them some­thing else.

Any­way, the annoy­ances with that machine left me look­ing for another, but I was hooked on con­ve­nience. Cof­fee that I could pre­pare with the lim­ited facil­i­ties that the morn­ing grants me was now a neces­sity. Swayed by the adver­tise­ments and that guy from Queer Eye, I picked up a Senseo. The Senseo is a “pod” cof­fee maker. This means it’s got a reser­voir or water and a place to put the pod — a paper wrapped packet of cof­fee that looks like a large round tea bag — which seals so the cof­fee is made under slightly high pres­sure (like espresso, only not so much) and is quickly pro­duced into a small cup. It was pretty bad. I tried to con­vince myself that the cof­fee really wasn’t that bad. I mostly failed, but I did make the inter­est­ing dis­cov­ery that the super­mar­ket brand pods were almost tol­er­a­ble, while the name brand pods were just par­a­lyt­i­cally bad.

I was up vis­it­ing my par­ents for Thanks­giv­ing and was exposed to their Keurig cof­fee maker. The idea was sim­i­lar to the Senseo, except the pods were small sealed plas­tic cups, and the cof­fee was actu­ally good. In fact, it was Green Moun­tain Cof­fee Roast­ers, a brand I’ve enjoyed since they were a lit­tle shop in Winooski, and whose mete­oric rise to suc­cess con­tin­ues to amaze and amuse me. I’d seen machines like this before, only much more exten­sive, at car deal­er­ships. I ended up ooh-ing and ah-ing over it that they ended get­ting me one that Christ­mas. I’ve been using it ever since. The coffee’s not quite as good as it would be if I took the time to hand brew or press a pot, but it’s fin­ished in under a minute, and it’s close enough to keep me content.

It does have one weak­ness — it’s not cheap. At the cost of the pods, I’m pay­ing about 50 cents per cup, which is vastly cheaper than buy­ing it, but much more expen­sive than brew­ing it. I’m ok with this, but I real­ize not every­one pri­or­i­tizes cof­fee the way I do. If you want to make a bet­ter cup, for less money, I’s sug­gest doing it the Alton Brown way.

So, I’ve been using the Keurig for quite some time, but the final piece of the puz­zle fell into place last week. I was stopped at a Cari­bou Cof­fee, and I lin­gered over the assorted cups and ser­vices they had, and the Con­tigo Extreme brand cups caught my eye. They seemed like the right size for me, but they were $20 a pop, so I let them pass. But that week­end, Costco had a pair of them for $20, and that was worth giv­ing them a try.

I was blown away. These cups man­age to keep my cof­fee hot for an insanely long time, and you can never tell by touch­ing it. It can be cold to the touch, and still crazily hot inside. Even more impor­tantly, it fits _exactly_ into the Keurig, and holds pre­cisely two large serv­ings, with just enough room for cream. And it seals well enough that I could flip a full cup over to read the bot­tom with­out concern.

This has trans­formed my merely excel­lent cof­fee sys­tem into some­thing that is mak­ing my every day bet­ter, and any­one in the same boat might want to take a look at these.