Summer fun food and drink - Doctor Horrible online now · Sunday July 20, 2008 by colin newell
It is not often that I suggest doing something (to my readers) with a strict time-line.
Like, right now. Do it now. Not tomorrow. But now.
Especially when that something is going to make you smile. Broadly. You might even laugh. I promise you that you might laugh. And see something in this… within yourself. Which might make you feel kind of warm and tingly.
To quote activist, comedian, writer and friend Bob Harris – “If you do not enjoy watching this, then there is nothing inside you worth saving!”
Took the words right out of my… well, maybe not.
The Doctor Horrible Sing Along Blog. Go there now.
There are three acts. Watch one. Then Two. And finally three.
You will be glad you did.
And when you do, come back here. And e-mail me and let me know how it went. A simple thank-you will do.
But don`t hold back. Anything is good.
Short-Take: Portland’s Coffee Central · Wednesday July 2, 2008 by colin newell
Portland is that third city on the West Coast that is similar to Vancouver and Seattle.
Comparable in size to Vancouver, both cities share many similarities: industry, port city, wet winters, trendy urban districts, fiery-hot real estate markets…the list could go on.
The Portland coffee scene seems to be on-par with Vancouver’s as well. Two weeks ago, I visited the city for an annual sports competition I compete in, and made some time to check out the city and the coffee scene within.
After some research and mapping out good coffee spots around the city relative to my hotel, Stumptown Coffee Roasters looked to be the spot. Cruising through some of Portland’s more historic neighborhoods in the Hawthorne district, I arrived at Stumptown.
The original location where roasting occurs daily, I thought this would be the location to take in the full Stumptown experience. Housed in an old low-rise brick warehouse, the location is in a quiet residential neighborhood; the perfect setting for a great coffee meeting place. I decided to start the tasting off with an espresso macchiato, a good choice to test out the espresso.
Hair Bender is their espresso mainstay; it is a lighter roast, sort of a northern Italian style. These guys know how to prepare a proper bar drink as well. After cruising around the back of the retail store and snooping around their roaster and bins of ready-to-roast green beans, I gained the sense that these guys are really into the source of their product.
Cruising through their website, the focus on supporting sustainable growers and the socio-economic aspects of coffee overseas certainly appears to be a focus for this company. I then grabbed an Americano for the road, and 1lb. of Hair Bender whole beans to enjoy once back in Vancouver.
There are five locations of Stumptown in the Portland area, and two locations much closer to me in downtown Seattle. I came away from my visit making some very similar comparison to a few coffee shops in Vancouver. JJ Bean and 49th Parallel could be seen as the Vancouver equivalents of this Portland shop. I will say that the Stumptown espresso is right up there with the best I have had on the West-Coast (considered to be coffee-central for North America). As well as checking out a few more independent coffee shops in the Portland area, I can now say that this city has just one more thing in common with it’s two Pacific-Northwest sister cities to the north.
Dave Reimer is a Vancouver resident, gold medalist rower, itinerant dude and all around great guy. His contributions periodically grace the coffeecrew blog.
The quirky the funny the silly in Canadian living · Monday June 30, 2008 by colin newell
We get a magazine from time to time… with our daily paper. It comes along maybe once a month.
And not everyone gets it. We get it because we live in a somewhat Chi chi neighborhood… and we are renters… for now. heh-heh heh-heh heh-heh.
This magazine is a tome to conspicuous consumption, to gratuitous excess, to the joy of being all that you can be… better. It represents about 1/10 of 1% of the local population in terms of net worth.
Photo below – The magazine picture above is a spoof of the one that I am talking about. Click it for the full meal deal
So, if you are not driving a Mercedes-Benz, or a Bentley, or a Jaguar – then your are definitely not worthy of reading these gold stained pages.
But it begs the question – who the heck reads this stuff and buys all these gilded products; botox treatments, solid gold-plated bathroom fixtures, kilo-buck spa weekends and real estate listings that boggle the imagination?
Anyone?
It is Un-Canadian. Canadians are a modest lot – and we do not flaunt it… whatever it is. And yet this magazine exists. Full of ads of Real-Estate agents that only sell zillion dollar houses… and lawyers for rich people that have gotten themselves into a pickle and plastic surgeons for those occasions when the lawyer cannot get you out of the pickle and you need to change the appearance of the pickle.
Get my drift? No?
Anyway – in this, the first in a continuing series on Canadian oddities in our society, I will peck very gently at the delicate gold plated under carriage of Canuck society.
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All in a days work #1 · Saturday April 12, 2008 by colin newell
You might find this funny… or not.
I work at a local University in Technical-Rich Media.
I would tell you the department but we change names almost weekly.
Part of my job involves debugging anything electronic anywhere on campus… on any piece of equipment… excluding fax and photocopiers.
Anyway – I noticed a ticket in our computer based help-desk system for a task over in IMP – the Island Medical Program… in an area that I had a small part in building. But other than some visits to various lecture halls in the last year, I have not been upstairs.
One of the labs on the Upper levels had some issues with a flaky multi-media distribution matrix… and they wanted a 2nd opinion on expediting a solution.
So I exchanged a few e-mail with the lead tech over there, grabbed my doctors bag and some extra cable terminations and the appropriate tools, and away I went.
The issue in question was in G.A. Gross Anatomy…
complete with bags… and people, I mean, cadavers in them.
I should have read the fine print on the work ticket… not that it would have mattered.
So there I was… working in a lab full of bodies… one “bag”
within a few feet…
So I said… after looking in my tool-bag.
“Which one of you knows where my Red Robertson screwdriver is?”
“Anyone?”
Yea. Funny huh?
I felt a bit queasy for a minute or so… but it passed.
I asked the resident Tech there: “Why didn’t you tell me that
I would be in a room full of bodies?”
And he said…
“Because you would not come over…”
And I said.
“You have a point…”
I my entire life, I have seen about 2 bodies one with his head underneath a jacket. I will spare you the details because this is not that kind of web-blog.
But being in a room with 12 sets of human remains in body bags… a room cooled to single digits… well, it was sobering in an odd kind of way. It is one of those experiences that you never know how you will feel until you are actually there.
