Monthly Archives: May 2003

Is Starbucks Evil?

Posted on by

When I was talking to Jan last week, we had discussed, in passing, the nature of Starbucks. Voracious readers of Our Story will recall that I’m a Starbucks fan. From the drinks to the wireless access, I just really enjoy taking the laptop in, plopping down in an overstuffed chair, and spending an hour or so hanging out.

Sarah and I discovered last week that there’s a Starbucks right around the corner from The Village Church, on Greenwich Avenue. I mentioned to Jan that this was a strong draw to come back to the church and she balked, exclaiming, “Starbucks is evil!” The rationale goes something like this: Starbucks has a stated business objective to put any and all competition out of business—especially targeting small-business comptetitors. What probably goes hand-in-hand with this argument is that Starbucks is a multinational corporation who leads an extremely well-branded marketing campaigns and has a track record of putting local businesses into bankruptcy court—much in the same way that Walmart and the Home Depot have done to competing businesses.

But, is this really evil? I mean, I work for a multinational corporation. We have a brand strategy. One of our stated objectives is to crush our competition. That’s business. You don’t go into the market to “kinda” get marketshare from your competitors, any more than the Nets “kinda” want to beat the Celtics.

However—I know—it’s not all that simple. In a world where power is on the side of the oppressors (cf. Ecclesiastes 4), the powers of business need to be checked. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Global business has a track record of disregarding human rights issues to protect their own bottom line—justice-based business initiatives cut into profits.

What’s more difficult is that people are wrestling with the concept of America as a corporately branded culture in the 21st century. This is may not be an unfamiliar concept to you, but what “will really bake your noodle later on is,” can you even fathom what it would be to not live in a branded culture? Try it, just for a minute. Can you imagine not growing up with Thundercats and that great Eye of Thundera logo? Or, not aligning yourself with the car company whose product you drive? Or, not drooling over the latest Apple-branded gadget (okay, some of you may not have to imagine that)? :) What must life have been for people who, even a hundred years ago, didn’t have such prevalent signs and logos?

Anyway, I don’t have answers to these questions. So, I turned to Google. (Insert brand irony here). The top ten-or-so hits returned these articles which, if nothing else, provide something to think about:

* PuntiveArt: Starbucks – Chain != Evil. The main complaint I hear about Starbucks is that they put the indies out of business. Sometimes they do, other times they don’t. From all the indies I hung out in, I can tell you most of them deserved to go out of business. Average coffee, horrible service, minimal selection.
* Fluffybunny: Bringing Down Starbucks… one latte at a time. The third trip found me again facing the smirking barista who called into question my right to use another coupon. The coupon’s only stated limitation was one per visit so I politely pointed out the fine print and told him not to skimp on the froth. He grudgingly served me my coffee and I smiled my warmest ‘season’s greetings’ to him before turning away.
* ihatestarbucks.com: Why do I, personally, hate Starbucks? I hate them because their coffe sucks and they are everywhere. You cant escape them.
* Ocean Beach Grassroots Organization: Starbucks not welcome in OB. Since March 2001, thousands of activists have taken part in protests and leafleting events outside $tarbucks cafes in over 300 cities in the US, Canada, New Zealand and England. Man, these guys are passionate about this. Lots of links here, too.
* Starbucks: Corporate Social Responsibility. Giving back to our communities is the way we do business. Contributing positively to our communities and environment is so important to Starbucks it is listed as a guiding principle of the companys mission. Partners at all levels are involved in this initiative in a number of areas, helping to improve resources and well-being in our surroundings.

When deep space exploration ramps up, itll be the corporations that name everything: the IBM stellar sphere, the Microsoft galaxy, Planet Starbucks. – Fight Club

Update: More reading:

* Starbucks: 2002 10-K. Net revenues increased 24% from $2.6 billion in fiscal 2001 to $3.3 billion in fiscal 2002, primarily due to the Companys store expansion program and comparable store sales increases…As a result of its expansion strategy of clustering stores in existing markets, Starbucks has experienced a certain level of cannibalization of sales of existing stores by new stores as store concentration has increased…This cannibalization, as well as increased competition, slowing economies and other factors, may put downward pressure on the Companys comparable store sales growth in future periods. I went looking for this after Ryan mentioned it in his comment. Starbucks 24% net revenue growth is astounding, especially when one considers that this is accounting for “downward pressure” of Starbucks’ “cannibalization” growth strategy.
* Hoover’s: Starbucks Corporation Profile. Starbucks’ strategy is simple: Establish its name everywhere. Chairman Howard Schultz estimates the coffee company will hit 20,000 stores before it lets up. Having conquered the US, the company is invading Europe… Note: don’t bother clicking on the link unless you have or want to purchase Hoover’s premium offerings.

Senior Project, Dogsitting, Schaeffer

Posted on by

We attempted to do a production install of our senior project software this afternoon on this machine. It turns out that the Tomcat web server software that was supposed to be running on the machine was replaced with something called ePrints. A production machine mysteriously had its web-guts torn out with absolutely no notice about two days ago (as best I could tell from using uptime), leaving us high and dry. Is this sort of thing common in the IT world? Maybe I should take up accounting… #

I’ve begun to read Francis Schaeffer again, which has been extremely refreshing for me and a welcome change from the rote consumption of technical data that this semester has been. I may have to quote extensive portions of True Spirituality in this space. Web Sites That Do Not Suck™ quote extensive portions of Francis Schaeffer. #

Speaking of which, do you know what the biggest hindrance will be to the Christian counterculture movement in the 21st century? It’s this: we just don’t understand semantic markup. I mean, com’on people—we actually believe that the Word was made flesh (cf. John 1)! Surely you’d think that this very statement in the Scriptures would express the critical importance of the written word. Context is king, subtlety is beautiful, and words have as much power to heal as they do to destroy. We have technologies that emphasize the context and subtlety and meaning of these words, but we still build web pages that are the browser-based equivalents of bad photocopies: tag soup, table alignments, and misshapen text. The web has been chosen as the medium for the voice of the Christian counterculture. I’m afraid that unless we start using the technology to its potential, no one is going to hear us. #

Sarah spent Friday and Saturday dogsitting for a friend of the family. It occurred to me in the process what kinds of sacrifice owning a large dog really involves:

* if you want to have dry feet, you must either buy slippers or wear shoes at all times
* sleeping in until 5 AM is a luxury
* eating anywhere but in the kitchen?—forget it
* washing your hands at least 3 times per hour
* entertaining friends and family by trying to make the dog turn his head to the side in order to understand you
* never, ever using the word “walk” again

Contrary to where this list may lead, we did have a really good time. :) #

If you don’t obsessively read Dive Into Mark everyday, you’ll likely have missed the CSS Zen Garden. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it: Dave Shea provides five nine (9!) completely different skins for the exact, same markup—all brought to you by the wonders of Cascading Style Sheets. #

Site Changes

Posted on by

Sarah is taking call again tonight, which means I’m sitting in the apartment alone with my MT templates–a very dangerous combination. :) You’ll certainly notice a bunch of changes here. Some of it is stuff that I’ve been cooking up for a little while now and some of it is stuff that I’ve done in the last 24 hours. In no particular order:

# I’ve set up Mark’s MT Macros plugin, which not only automatically appends <acronym> tags to predefined acronyms (such as HTML or NJIT), but also converts those cute smiley faces. (I double-checked with Mark to make sure that taking the smilies was copasetic–it was). I’ll work on getting this set up for comments soon, too.
# Set up Brad Choate’s MT Textile plugin, which does nice conversions in my blogs so I don’t have to expressly write out the HTML for things like the em dash entity or bulleted lists.
# Deprecated the JavaScript Dynamic Curly Quotes. That kinda sucked because I was so excited about getting that to work–MT Textile does it for me now, though.
# Migrated the WeatherBox graphics to this site rather than requesting them from another site (I know, I should probably be clubbed for doing that in the first place).
# Changed the font a bit. It should be somewhat easier to read now. At least, I think so. ;-)
# Jai cleaned up my banner graphic. Thanks, Jai!
# Minor markup and stylesheet tweaks.

In other news, in case you couldn’t tell, the stress has throttled back a bit from school. I still owe some homework and will take a final on Monday, and we still need to do a production install for the senior project, but there’s far less pressure than there was before I finished my Management paper (35 pages), the senior project documentation (101 pages), and our final presentation.

Sarah and I also decided to take a cruise to Bermuda for our anniversary. I can’t wait to get out there with some good books and just…relax.

Another Self Deprecating Title

Posted on by

I dropped Daypop from my news aggregator today. I’ve decided that the masses really are stupid, and I’m not that concerned about what they’re reading. #

MovableType: Sanitize: Cleaning Up Incoming Data.

When data is submitted by visitors to your site, that data should not necessarily be trusted. If you are allowing HTML in your comments, for example, visitors to your site could submit malicious HTML, or scripts in Javascript or PHP, to run code on your site. This code could do anything from reading cookies to reading private files on your server. To protect your site, Movable Type cleans up (“sanitizes”) any data submitted by visitors to your site. This includes any comment data and any TrackBack data. This cleanup is done to remove any code (HTML or otherwise) that could compromise the security of your site. The sanitization process works by only allowing certain HTML tags—any other tags, and all processing and scripting instructions (PHP, JSP, Javascript), are stripped…One other feature of the sanitization process is that it will add closing tags for any tags left open in the sanitized text. For example, if a visitor to your site opens a <b> tag and forgets the close it, the sanitize process will add a </b> tag.

The emphasis is mine on the last part there. After Jai and I had discussed the embarassment of bad comment markup a bit ago, I went looking for a way to solve the problem. I knew that it would probably involve MovableType macros at some level, I just hadn’t realized they integrated the Santize feature-set into version 2.63. So, this afternoon I upgraded. It wasn’t hard at all, but I would advise making a full backup of your MT install and data before getting started. At any rate, the comments are a bit more restrictive in the markup they allow (no more img tags—sorry, Jai), but protect against evil markup tricks like this. #

From the dumbest-inventions-ever department: do you remember those velcro monitor-mount copyholders that were all the rage in the mid-nineties? Did you ever apply one of those velcro strips to your monitor wondering how in the world you were ever going to remove it if need be? Well, today I got a free monitor from my friend Jode and was faced with such a quandry. I found such a great solution, though, that I’d like to share it:

How to remove crufty velcro-strips from otherwise decent old monitors

# Peel away a corner of the strip just enough to get a pair of pliars on the thing
# Use the pliars to peel the rest of the strip off
# Spray some WD-40 on the glue—the lubricant will act as a solvent to loosen the bonds of the glue
# Use a somewhat abrasive pad to scrub the glue away (this may take some time, repeated applications)
# Once the glue is off, use Windex or some other spray cleaner to remove the lubricant

That’s it! I think my father-in-law would be proud. :) #

Google is dancing. At the time of this writing, the new PageRank indexes are installed in two Google datacenters. I tried the “ken walker” and “sarah walker” searches at those data centers and was shocked to find Our Story had slipped from #8 to #21 and #3 to #11, respectively. Suck. #

I’m also starting to learn a bit about MT Macros (finally). I knew that you could use them to do cool stuff in MovableType. It’s just, well, there’s already so much cool stuff that MT will do that I don’t know that I never felt the need to go venturing out looking for more stuff to, well, not know. At any rate, I’m starting to experiment with automatic abbreviations, courtesy of—you guessed it—Mark Pilgrim. You know, I’d probably stop trying to imitate the guy if he didn’t do so much interesting stuff and then give away all his source code. :) #

Anyone know how to set up a bookmark in Mozilla (Firebird) such that I can type “d obfuscate” and have Mozilla query Dictionary.com for the definition of obfuscate? I’ve had the hardest time trying to find a general “help” manual online. Update: Asa provided some links to a number of references for this question. Thanks! #

As part of a clever sales initiative at work, management has been bringing in free lunches to encourage people to stay and work rather than go out. Though I don’t have anything to do with sales, I think it’s a great idea. And, as a coworker noted, free lunch always tastes better. #

The Village Church

Posted on by

Sarah and I went to the Village Church in NYC for the second time on Sunday and had an awesome time despite the 40 minute commute and $6 toll to cross through the Lincoln Tunnel.

The service was great. It was communion Sunday and the pastor gave an interesting exegesis of Ephesians 4:17-32, noting that Paul was pointing out that the Ephesians, in order to “no longer walk as the Gentiles,” were to care about each other in some rather mundane ways. Imagine: Paul was writing to people because he was concerned about how they cared about one another rather than giving them a bunch of rules and regulations. Funny that.

Sarah and I also met some people after the service. There was a booktable downstairs with some good stuff. Turns out the guy sitting behind the table was a writer for re:generation as well. He encouraged us to purchase some magazines and hang around to talk about postmodernism for a while.

The best part of the day, though, was taking a lunch invitation to hang with a crowd of 10-or-so people from church. I had the chance to sit across from a young lady, Jan, who had become a Christian about two years ago and was wrestling with some of her outside-in perspectives. It was neat because we were able to discuss a bit about the whole Christian-culture mindset that comes out of traditional evangelicalism. You know, it’s that mindset that makes you think, hey, maybe Skillet’s latest album really didn’t suck.

I explained to Jan my theory that evangelicals pride themselves on their separateness from the world. “Don’t you go consume those movies or that music,” they say, “or you’ll see sin start to creep into your life and take hold of your mind.” So, when we do, we create this huge cultural vacuum. I used to think that the Christian bookstore was great when I was in high school. I mean, in a world where I’m only supposed to consume all things Christian, the Christian bookstore was like Disneyland. I’ve since gotten over that, realizing that there’s as much truth to be found in Aaron Lewis‘ lyrics as there is in Aaron Tate‘s.

On the way home, Sarah and I had the opportunity to sit and digest everything from the day. I think we’re both excited to see more opportunities for conversation and reflection together.

Insert Clever Title Here

Posted on by

From the how-to-make-the-browser-stop-barking-at-me department: In Mozilla Firebird, go to the URL bar and type about:config and hit Enter. Sort the Preferences by name by clicking on the “Preference Name” header. Find accessibility.typeaheadfind.enablesound and double click on it. Type false in the box. Ah…that’s better.

How to get a MySQL database to work with Microsoft Access: download MyODBC, install it, and create a new ODBC connection. Open Access, and Link the tables. Sweet. I found this because I’m researching some last minute development for my senior project. I can only imagine the fun this would be with my MySQL account at PlugSocket.

Speaking of the senior project, one of the programmers on our team asked me about MovableType today. Very cool. Vishal, let me know when you get a blog set up. ;-)

A recent conversation (comment-sation? blog-ersation?) with Jai Brinkofski inspired me to go looking for ways to clean up/validate/generally make the markup in comments Not Suck™. Apparently, this has been a bit of a buzz lately. Oh, and I absolutely must add anchor tags so people can link to individual comments. More soon.

I found an alternative to Windows’ Telnet today. It’s called PuTTY. It doesn’t have a translucent background, but it’ll do. I’m using it to log into a Linux box at NJIT. It’s kinda depressing having left Linux a while ago only to come back and realize what I’ve forgotten.

Munchies

Posted on by

It’s 12:12 AM, and your paper is due in 18 hours.

You’re tired, you’re hungry, and you’re up to your eyeballs in Apple Computer’s 10-K report.

You want to nap, but you know if you do, you’re finished. You’ve got 10 pages left to write, and you need a way to stay awake.

What do you do?

Ramen Noodles, baby, Ramen Noodles. 20% of your NDA for saturated fat, and 33% of your sodium.

College life doesn’t get any better than this.

Later

It’s 2:44 PM, and your paper is due in 5 hours.

You’re tired, you’re hungry, and you’re up to your eyeballs in Apple Computer’s market share analysis.

You want to nap, but you know if you do, you’re finished. You’ve got 3 pages left to write, and you need to eat lunch.

What do you do?

Panera, baby, Panera. Smoked turkey breast, smoked bacon, smoked Gouda, leaf lettuce, tomato and our signature dressing, on our Tomato Basil bread.

&*#@ paper.

Later Still

It’s 5:21 PM, and your paper is due in 3 hours.

You’re edgy, you’re desperate, and you’re staring blankly at your word processor trying to come up with a conclusion.

You want to go play in traffic, but you know if you do, you’re finished. You’ve got a freakin’ page left to write and plenty of editing to do, and you need to remember that life is still worth living.

What do you do?

Frappuccino®, baby, Frappuccino®. Coffee, chocolate and coconut flakes blended with ice, topped with whipped cream, mocha syrup and coconut flakes.

I want my life back.

Finally

Done. One bowl of Ramen Noodles, one Panera Bacon Turkey Bravo plus chips plus Coke, and one Starbucks Frappuccino® later, the paper was finished and turned in on time. For those of you who may be interested in what the fuss was all about, my paper is available here in all its 35 pages of proprietary-format, diagram-ridden, poorly-edited, bandwidth-soaking glory. You can even amuse yourself with the fact that the paper gets dumber as my deadline draws nearer.

I’ll work on exporting an HTML because I’m trying to be a good netizen and get away from Microsoft Word’s proprietary format. It sure ain’t easy, though.

Update: The HTML version is now available due to my rapid web-space consumption. Thanks to Dean Allen’s Word HTML Cleaner.

Theoblogical Community, et al

Posted on by

I discovered TheoBlogical today (via Dave Winer).

Dale Lature: The Conversations the Churches Need. Meanwhile, conversations are conspicuously absent on Church sites, Denominational sites, and almost any kind of Church related site. Where forums are offered, they are not actively linked and promoted and encouraged. Churches say that they emphasize laity and then betray this philosophy by non-verbal, contextual clues such as putting the pulpit at the center—putting the sermon at the highest point of emphasis, publishing the articles of staff to the exclusion of stories of experiences and opinions of the laity. The Websites of Churches emphasize brochure stuff like Worship Service times, pictures of the staff, directions to the Church, and some newsletters (although the Web version is often more than a month behind the version of the Monthly newsletter already in the hands of members).

The Thunderbird project is progressing nicely, providing builds for Linux and Mac OS X this weekend. I can’t wait ’til I can get rid of Outlook Express!

20 pages into this paper and a few more to go…:)

They May Not Be Popups…

Posted on by

…but they sure are annoying.

Jeffrey Zeldman: Close that thing! Open that thing! We’ve opened third party links in a named new window since HTML first made it possible to do so. Some readers like this; others not. (No additional mail is needed on that subject.) New window haters, Blogzilla tells how to suppress new windows by hacking a file in your browser. It’s easy, takes a few seconds, and unexpected new windows will never torture you again.

I saw this on Blogzilla the other day, too, and quickly sang praises to the authors.

Trolling for Cash

Posted on by

A good friend of mine confided to me recently how much money he has made from the Amazon Associates referral program: it was well into the hundreds of dollars for last month alone. Wow.

The Amazon Associates program, if you don’t know, is really a more subtle form of paid advertising. You sign up with them and get a customized referral URL with a tracking number embedded in it. The idea is that you can take this custom URL, blog about a book or a Segway or a DVD, and link over to Amazon with it. If anyone who clicks through and purchases stuff (it doesn’t even have to be the thing you recommended), you get a cut of whatever they purchase up to $10. Not a bad deal. In fact, it’s better than that—you’d kinda have to be stupid not to use it.

There are entire blogs (like this one) that are dedicated to the Amazon referral program business model. I mean, it’s not a bad side-job if you think about it. This site costs me $50 a year, and a MovableType key (since I’d be making a profit) would cost ~$35 as a one-time fee. That, plus some time to make a sharp looking site and do the editorializing, is all it takes to rake in some serious cash. Probably not enough to make a living, but certainly enough to make some nice pocket money. My friend—who makes recommendations on a forum that he was already reading anyway—suggested that I set up an account with Amazon, and I’m considering the idea.

I mean, I have opinions that people are generally interested in by dint of the fact that people read Our Story. When I recently recommended Evanescence, linking over to Amazon would have been totally legitimate. I could also review good tech books to the advantage of some of my geekier readers. People who know me already know that I think O’Reilly books rule. If I would have recommended a book to them in person, why not do so online, too, and make a couple of bucks from having the knowledge? What’s more, the people who read what I have to write might even want to know my opinion about such products. It all seems like a win-win situation for everyone involved.

But then I’m confronted with worldviews like this (and, perhaps to a more extreme degree, this) and I’m given pause. In the same way I was debating over my overt Google-consciousness when I post up on the Internet, I wonder if I really want to be motivated by the Cash Cow when I even just write. Besides, people are already taking issue with the overt link-obsession that Google’s PageRank has caused in the online community, who wants to give Jeff Bezos that much power as well?

It’s the age-old problem of creative self-expression versus making a pragmatic buck, I guess. I don’t mean to denegrate my friend’s hobby—I actually think it’s a really shrewd and clever way to make some money by doing something that you enjoy. I just think that Our Story isn’t the place for me to do that.

Thoughts?

(Note: of course, if I ever did sign up for the program, this blog would have to “go away.” Amazon expressly states that you cannot mention the program in your advertising site.)