Category: Weblog

Dollar Coins

I finally received one of the new dollar coins from the bank today.


I’ve always been partial to the dollar coin. As a child, my Uncle Joe would give us the large Eisenhower dollars and then seemed huge and impressive. When in England, it seems so natural to use the pound and two pound coins I’ve never understood why it hasn’t been more popular in the US.
Recently the US Mint released the series of Presidential $1 Coins, hoping to revitalize interest in using the dollar coin. The State Quarter series is popular with just about everyone.
Back in 1979, the Mint began striking the Susan B. Anthony dollars. After two years, they stopped and no new dollar coins were made until 2000, when the Sacagawea Dollar Coins were introduced. You can read more Dollar Coin history at wikipedia, of course.
I liked the Susan B. Anthony dollars quite a bit. The story of Women’s Suffrage in the US is an important thing to remember as we struggle with new issues of equality and human rights.
But I must say, the new dollars are pretty nice, with a good look and color.

The reverse sides are interesting as well. If you can’t tell, the reverse of the Anthony shows an eagle landing on the Moon with the earth in the background. How sweet is that?
The new reverse on the Presidential Dollar is great as well. The simplicity of the design and the move from ONE DOLLAR to $1 is nice.
If we all start using dollar coins for our daily business, it will get them into the register tills and back into the hands of others. So start using the dollar coin and stop using the dollar bill.

Customer Service at McDonalds

On the way to work, I stopped by McDonald’s for a cup of coffee. I’ve written about coffee at McDonald’s before.
As I made my order in the drive thru, they asked if I wanted cream and sugar. I told them one cream and two sugars. They offered to mix it for me. I told them that it would be great if they could. Sure enough, they handed me a cup of coffee ready to drink.
In the past, you get a cup of coffee and a bag with creme and sugar in it and have to mix it together yourself in your car as you drive away. Now, McDonald’s has given people a good reason to stop there for coffee, customer service.
This a straightforward and simple change, but for some reason no one seems to have thought about it before.
As I drove away, I wondered, why doesn’t Starbucks offer this service? That little crowd smush up at the coffee condiments bar could be avoided by most people leaving it to the wack-jobs that put cinnamon in their coffee. I predict Starbucks will offer this service within 3 months.

Stok Black Coffee Shots

Michele and I were at the 7-Eleven on Friday getting coffee, when we saw this.


Sitting with the various creamers were two large boxes of Stok coffee shots. Upon further inspection, the Stok shots are simply caffeine shots. The silver one is sweetened and the gold one is just caffeine. There’s no dairy in it, so it’s likely a purely chemical concoction and even good for vegans…
At 40 milligrams of caffeine per shot, that’s a heavy duty boost. It’s half of the caffeine you get in a can of Red Bull.

I popped one of the sweet ones into my coffee and headed off to work. I didn’t notice anything spectacular, but it’s a pretty cool idea.
The note on the package of “limit 2/day” is just begging to be tested by someone.
According to the fine people at Energy Fiend, it would take around 300 Stok coffee shots to kill a 175 lb. person. Putting that in to realistic terms, that would mean drinking a gallon of Stok.
So get yourself to 7-Eleven and Stok up! (ha-ha-ha-ha)

Digg’s Decision and Bad Advice

Not to go completely against the general flow of the blogosphere general consensus regarding Digg and the AACS issue, but the recommendation at Demand Satisfaction is unrealistic and unpractical.
Digg posted publicly about their decision at 1PM on the day of the ‘revolt’. Jay was clear on exactly why they made their decision. Digg censors all kinds of things from porn to torrent sites to hate speech routinely. There is no dialog about this. No transparency or ‘candid feedback’ on those types of posts is necessary.
By the evening the Digg users had turned into an unruly mob that overwhelmed Digg’s systems. In the larger scheme of things, the 09 number itself is no big deal and already revoked, but somehow it caught the attention of Digg’s users and the mob was not a pretty sight.
Faced with the complete loss of control of the site, Kevin, Jay, and the rest of Digg were faced with a simple decision:
Is the risk of a DMCA lawsuit worse than the risk of losing the Digg users (the essential element to their success) ?
Obviously they felt that the risk of lawsuit was lower and bowed to the wishes of the mob on this issue within 8 hours. It had nothing to do with the right or wrong of the DMCA/AACS issue and everything to do with Digg staying in business. Consider that if tonight, the Digg users decided they wanted to fill the front page with porn links, they could do that as well. What stops them from doing that? I don’t know exactly what, but it sure isn’t ‘transparency’ or ‘candid feedback’ on why porn is not allowed on Digg.
The suggestion at Demand Satisfaction that calm, reasoned debate would have worked is laughable. Reasoned debate and the interweb do not belong in the same sentence. Discussions on long running sites like Metafilter or Kuros5in are hardly make people feel they are part of “the decision”. Go read any MetaTalk thread and see the snarkfest it routinely descends into on the simplest decision like changing colors. The wing nuts over at Flickr that freaked out over the ‘Old Skool’ message are just another example of catering too much to a vocal minority and over-explaining your rationale.
The kind of warm and fuzzy thinking at Demand Satisfaction is nice in an academic sense, but anyone trying to run their business that way, by explaining every decision, is fooling themselves. You will never please everyone and often make the problem worse, the more you try to explain. Everything doesn’t need to be a discussion. You need to pick your discussions just as you pick your battles.
Yes, dialog with your users is an important tool for any web site or business for that matter, but it is not the only tool. Many people seems to think that giving the users control is the only tool you need. Those people are wrong. Do not forget the old saying, ‘When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.’

Foosh Mints

The people are Vroom Foods, makers of the Buzz Bites caffeinated chocolates, sent me some samples to try. They included some Foosh Mints as well.


Now, I’m not a full fledged caffeine fiend, like some people, so this dosage of caffeine is pretty strong in my book. 100 milligrams is a whole bunch of caffeine compared to a can of soda.

They tossed a bunch of other stuff like, Taurine, Ginseng, and some of the B vitamins. The B vitamins are supposed to boost your energy level as well. If you look at what’s in most of the energy drinks out there today, it’s the same basic list.

The mints themselves are fairly large, I guess to pack in all the caffeine, you need some bulk. The mints themselves taste very much like Altoids with a strong taste. I wouldn’t eat them for fun, but if I needed a lift, they’d be great.

Everyone, slow the eff down on the road

Yesterday, I saw one accident on my way home from work. Today, on my way to work, I saw yet another accident.
Slow down people. I’m sick of hearing the now familiar screech-crunch sound.
Just two rules to follow and we’ll all be better off.
1) Yellow lights mean slow down, not speed up and go faster.
2) Put down the damn telephone. If it’s that important gets a handsfree or pull over. I watched as the crasher did not stop talking on the phone before, during, and after the accident.
That’s it, two simple rules and I won’t have to through hate in your direction.

Homemade dog biscuits

My daughter Zoe is in the Girls Scouts and recently has been working to help the local Pasadena Humane Society. One of the things they did, besides making cloth beds for cats, was to make dog biscuits.
Michele told me it was easy and that Piper, our dog, liked them. Alas, they were all given away, so I didn’t have a chance to see them. I had some free time on Sunday and decided to give it a try.
The recipe is from the Pasadena Humane Society:

2 ½ cups whole wheat flour
½ cup powdered milk
½ tsp. salt
½ tsp. garlic powder
½ cup ice water
6 tblsp margarine, shortening or meat drippings
1 egg beaten
1 tsp. brown sugar
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine flour, milk, salt and sugar. Cut in shortening until mixture resembles cornmeal. Mix in egg. Add enough water so that the mixture forms a ball. Pat out with your fingers the dough ½ inch thickness on a lightly oiled cookie sheets. Cut with biscuit or cookie cutter into shapes. Save the scraps and pat them out with the next batch. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes. Remove from oven and cool. Store in zip lock bag in the freezer.

We had also made some baked beans from scratch this weekend, so I had some bacon grease saved from that to use instead of margarine. Everybody loves bacon, even Piper.


I mixed up the ingredients and was a bit concerned over the use of garlic, but when I put the garlic in front of Piper, she seemed to like it.

I mixed things up and got the dough to a good consistency when I reached my first dilemma. I didn’t really want to roll out the dough and start using cookie cutters on it. I’ve done the cookie cutter thing before for gingerbread cookies and didn’t feel that a dog would exactly care.

So I reached deep into my youth and remembered the way my Grandmother used to make sausages. She’d mix up the meat, place a small amount into her hand, squeeze, and then toss the resulting shape into the frying pan. I thought that Piper likes sausage, so away I went, making Sicilian sausage shaped dog biscuits.
Onto the parchment paper went the dog sausage biscuits and into the over for about a half hour.

Sure enough out popped the biscuits, and damn if they didn’t smell good.

For the real test I handed one to Piper. At first she was a bit hesitant as you can see, but soon was munching away happily.
The recipe wasn’t hard at all, so if you have a dog, you might enjoy making your own treats.

Mini Ben & Jerry’s

Michele found these mini Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cups and the whole family is enamored with them.


I think they come in six packs, but I’ve never seen them fresh from the store, only scattered in the freezer after the girls have had a first chance at them.
Each cup is around 3.5 ounces of ice cream, a little over 200 calories per cup. Not exactly diet fare, but of you want a taste of ice cream, it’s a good way to keep yourself from eating a whole pint in a sitting.

Under the lid is a small spoon to eat with. Pretty handy once you finish to put the spoon inside, recap the cup and no mess.
Personally, I’m partial to Oatmeal Cookie Chunk, but I haven’t seen it in the mini cup yet.