Time for a departure from my normally scheduled crap concerning lame-ass web startups* and stuff I like on the internet.  This post is about COFFEH!

This post is also going to be profane.  Watch those sensitive ears, ladies. 

Coffee, as a rule, is delicious.  I don't care how you imbibe it, be it lattes, cappuccinos, espressos, regular fucking coffee, whatever.  It all tastes good and it all has a fucking stranglehold on my brain.  It has gotten to the point now where a day without caffeine input (preferably coffee) leaves me incredibly irritable and with a skullsplitting headache. 

As addictions go, this is a pretty tame one.  I'm not sucking dick for coffee in alleys, or mugging people from the Midwest on vacation for coffee money.  I should be glad that I am addicted to such a readily available substance.  However, I am dismayed, probably just like any cocaine/heroin/janjaweed addict, by the vastly varying quality of my substance of choice.

Point in case:  I am drinking a Dunkin' Donuts** coffee right now.  It tastes like pee.  But it is still much, much better than some coffee you can get.  While it dismays me that this coffee is the best available to me on my way to UNH, it also makes me glad I am not drinking coffee from Cumby's, a disgusting gas station chain whose radio ads constantly shrill how awesome and trendy they are for serving Bengal Trader coffee ("ANY SIZE JUST 99 CENTS!  YOU BETTER GET TO CUMBY'S!").  After some thought (not a lot, though), I decided to rank my coffee options:

1)  Taste The Golden Spray
This is the highest ranking, reserved for the best indie coffee shops and other fine places where you can get some exotic shit to placate the monkey on your back.  Also Illy, which I consider to be some of the tastiest mass produced coffee, unless you can get some Zabar's.  The finest uncut Colombian. 

2)  I'd Buy THAT For A Dollar
This is my ranking for the best chains.  I'd say stuff like Starbuck's and Seattle's Best rank in here somewhere.  China white:  it's been stepped on a little, but it's better than what everyone else is getting.

3)  Mean Bean Machine
Dunkin' Donuts and all their ilk.  Semi-decent coffee if you are in a hurry and don't need anything but a fix.  Compare to Mexican Brown:  tastes a little weird, still gets you where you need to go.

4)  Cleveland Steamer In A Paper Cup
Gas station coffee.  Any kind.  It's all gross.  Green Mountain is the best of this group, but still shitty.  Badly stepped on Mexican Brown.  Cut with Ajax.

5)  SANKA TIME
Any decaf, anywhere.  Hardware store complimentary coffee.  ANY complimentary coffee.  You're bootin' black tar heroin now.

And that's all I got today.  Maybe tomorrow I will make fun of how useless Open Social is so far.  Or maybe write about my amigo John's blog, which is so far even more content-free than my own, which is a feat indeed.





*  Seriously, WTF.  Like Amazon is impossible to use or some shit.  Also their site design looks like one of those linkjack shitholes.  As Ted Dziuba has been known to say, WARP FACTOR FAIL.

**  Those of you from somewhere other than New England may not know what Dunkin Donuts is.  I don't care.

 
 

Happy Halloween.  I am (probably) going to Salem to view the masses of ridiculously complexly costumed folks drunkenly wandering the streets.

But the point of this short but sweet update is something Google had up its sleeve and recently displayed slyly, like a magician who knows damn well he has your card (link to Marc Andreesen's blog, which is worth reading if you can figure out how to navigate to his old pages.  I think he has like 10 entries total.)

The gist of Google's gutsy move is that it has, with the consent of heavy hitters such as LinkedIn and Orkut, created an open API that can be used across many social networking sites.  This is typical Google brilliance:  many developers are afraid to develop apps for say, Facebook, due to fear that they will be trapped in a walled garden with no portability.  Now one app can be written and ported to many social sites with very minimal modification.  It is not perfectly cross-platform, however: Myspace and Yahoo have not deigned to sign on with this cabal of social climbers.

This is looking good for Google.  And even better for any social networking app startups.  Rock on, little friends.

UPDATE:  Myspace is now among the Open Social consortium.  The gods must be crazy.