Informal Brain

* The warm sandwiches “are going to be out by year’s end.” In the meantime, they will be “de-emphasized.” * Serving sandwiches got in the way of employees’ “ability to make the perfect shot of espresso.” In other words, spending time on sandwiches took away from the focus on coffee. * The sandwiches will be replaced with “a breakfast menu that delivers what our customers are asking for.” * “We’re going to be in the lunch business; we’re going to modify it.” [From Starbucks to get rid of warm breakfast sandwiches]

What we learned today from the new CEO of Starbucks was good news. The awful breakfast sandwiches are on the way out. Quite frankly, if you actually saw a disgruntled Starbucks employee rip one of these cardboard wonders out of the plastic wrap and toss it into the store space heater it was completely unappealing. Pretty much disgusting. And the CEO of Starbucks hits the smell issue right on the head. The sandwiches stunk up the stores. As a bit of coffee snob, I like to walk into my coffee shop and be presented with the wonderful odor of roasted coffee, not burn cheese and bacon. A bit too MacDonalds if you ask me.

What is interesting is they are going to go full on into a more full lunch offering. I wonder if this is the right move, or if they should focus on the coffee and pastry offerings. If you visit Seattle’s Best stores I think they have it right. Great customer service with the right focus on great tasting coffee drinks and good pastry offerings. Seattle’s Best fells like the brand Starbucks really wants to be. Seattle’s best asks your name at the register, and they remember you and your drink orders. Something you will not find at Starbucks very often. It is one of those small personal touches which makes the experience just slightly less corporate.

Ah, I imagine some poor QA guy had to tell Jobs that the software just isn’t ready to ship. Unfortunately it was probably the same QA guy who told the program manager that it would be ready to ship 2 weeks after the Macworld Keynote. I am sure that QA guy is not a popular person anymore.

Apple also announced that the free Apple TV software update enabling movie rentals is not quite finished and will now be available in another week or two.

[From Apple - Start]

Kingstad Gallery Opening
Originally uploaded by Shawn Smith

The entire family headed out to the Kingstad gallery tonight to view the newest show by artists from around the Portland area. We recently met Katie Todd when she came to our home to put on a Demarle Party with my wife Julie. Katie is a gifted artist and we happy to get an invite to come out an see her work.

Here is a link to her website.

Here is a sample of her artwork:

Katie’s Artwork

I noticed this poll tonight on KATU.com. As I suspected, the tax rebates will serve to put some money back into our pockets but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if most people will either use it to pay down debt, or put it in savings to boost their liquidity. Either way, it isn’t going to end up being spent on many big screen TVs.

A great write-up by a third party articulating the different environments needed for a mature IT shop. What i think is missing here is Production FIX. This is the environment you develop / test in when the main environments have the next version of IT infrastructure, configurations or software.

There are typically three different environments in IT which have different roles. They tend to reflect the importance of that application/system to the end users.

1. Test/Development - used for the application developers to test their application code or new layered applications - they might have administration rights to the Windows/Linux servers in this environment.
2. Staging/UAT (User Acceptance Testing) - used for functional testing, should ideally be a replication of production. Once my code has been validated, it’s pushed to staging so that I can carry out due diligence and functional testing before I put the code/application into production. Access should be restricted so that code is validated in near production conditions.
3. Production - business affecting or user affecting systems, an outage therefore on these systems might damage our reputation or cause loss of revenue. Administration and security should be restricted in order to protect data and system reliability.

The idea is that by having the different operating environments you can limit any infrastructure or application failures through adequate testing which may include performance load testing.

[From What’s UAT then?]

Hey, where is my Apple TV Take 2 update? Tomorrow is 2 weeks. Let’s see a shiny software update first thing in the morning!

Perhaps the RDF (reality distortion field) also distorts time and space. Maybe it will be released in during Microsoft “summer”, (late September).

Things are coming along nicely with the latest theme landings. Looks like we won’t have the new “keyhole” look for maybe a few days on OS X but for now it is a nice improvement. The app is starting to really fit with the OS. Now, if only Firefox 3 synced with the iPhone I might think about putting Safari Webkit away for a bit.

Time for some more testing…

Each and every day I come home from work and check my RSS feeds for the glorious news of the Apple TV take 2 update being available. Now, Jobs did say 2 weeks at the keynote. I was hoping for a bit earlier launch but it looks like it is coming right down to the wire. Here is hoping for a tuesday launch date! I can’t wait to have the ability to buy a show from my couch. Here is also hoping that I can update podcasts from the TV rather then the computer. I can’t count how often the NBC news podcast gets stuck and I don’t have the latest news downstairs.

Arg! My mighty mouse is becoming not so mighty these days, Two things have gone horribly wrong. First no matter how much I clean my scroll wheel I can go down the page like butter but scrolling up just never works. Secondly, the top shell of the mouse seems to have disconnected from the bottom shell. Thus when clicking you get this strange “thunk” sound half of the time. I know this is a common problem and I wonder if it has something to do with the scrolling problem. I am tempted to go and get a new mouse, but I wonder if I should try the apple mouse again. As much as I love apple my Microsoft scroll mouse never gave me these kinds of problems…. sigh!

“The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible” (A. J. Jacobs)

I am currently reading the newest book by AJ Jacobs. I had recently finished his excellent previous book about his quest to read the entire encyclopedia. So far his latest book is just as good. His quest to not only abide by biblical doctrine but to also understand religion, and faith makes for an amazing tale.