Ben: Coffee

If I had one word to describe my year off to date, I’d say “Reflection.” If I had two, they’d be “Reflection” and “Design.” But, if I had a third word, it would be “Coffee” (the fourth phrase would be “really bad music” just in case you were wondering).

Coffee has become a strong passion for Chester, George and I. It started out from our work on designing products for the specialty coffee industry, but it has become so much more.

We have tried dozens of coffees from across the US brewed in many different methods. We’ve grown from buying coffee that costs $4/lb to tasting (but not really buying) coffee that is well over $100/lb (though we usually settle on coffee which is around $14/lb). We’ve met a ton of amazing people who share this passion. And we’ve learned a lot… enough to know that we know almost nothing about coffee.

There are a few things that I really like about coffee.

First and foremost, the mathematician and engineer in me like the fact that producing good coffee requires the optimization of dozens of coupled variables. As much as we try, there isn’t a closed form solution to this problem; there isn’t an equation which will produce the perfect cup of coffee. As a result, there is always room for experimenting and trying things out.

The entrepreneur in me likes the fact that the Specialty Coffee Industry is young and growing at a non-trivial rate. This means that there is lots of excitement in the industry and lots of change in the technologies. It also means that what is considered the best today will be laughed at 6 months from now. Things aren’t stationary.

The anthropologist and designer in me likes the fact that everyone is so passionate about their work. They love spending time working on coffee, and are such rich and complex individuals as a result of it. It’s pleasurable to design for them.

The humanist and socialist in me likes the fact that the community is so considerate. Everyone is driven by something higher than money- good coffee. People in rival companies help eachother out. There’s always someone out there willing to help you out, even if it doesn’t help them out any. It’s great.

It also helps that I really like coffee shops and the taste of coffee.

It’s super fantastic.

There should be some sort of alert for this

Whoa! I had just opened up the LOA stats to show my parents the curious effect that the subway map had on our hits (as I remarked in a previous post), and found that it has exploded to become an order of magnitude greater than before. Whereas we used to get nearly 400 hits a week, we’ve been recently averaging more than 500 a day. This is all very curious, but it seems to really take off a few weeks after my post remarking on the initial effect. I took a look at our most popular search terms (still “New York Subway” and “New York Subway Map”, and still accounting for 99% of hits), I found that our picture of the subway system actually came up second on Google Image Search for both. I wish I’d done this just a few days earlier, because it seems possible that our recent slump could be caused by a bump from the first place spot. Damn that stonesoup.org!

Anyway, it looks like the attention doesn’t extend far beyond the post that started it all, though it’s impossible to tell if people are perusing the main site, or getting RSS feeds (and being sorely disappointed out our output). Still, I’m going to enjoy my little internet fame. In fact, I think I will use it to start a user-content driven web 2.0 crowdsourced social networking app.

And by that I mean, if you’re looking for a friend (social netwoking), leave a comment with your favorite movie (user generated content). If you see a pair of compatable looking movies (2.0 of them, to be precise), email me (crowdsourcing) and I won’t do anything (I’m still working on the app part).

Happy holidays!

So, what are you doing with your year off?

The worst part about being a LOAner (one of my goals this term is to get an arbitrary term into the common lexicon) is constantly answering the question “So, what are you doing with your year off?” and its variants “What have you been up to?” and “Which one of your family members is going to support you when you’re unemployed and living on the street?”

It’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask. If I tell someone that I’m studying Systems engineering (“It’s a combination of mechanical and electrical- sort of half a double major”) at a small but respectable accredited engineering college in Massachusetts, they would have a concrete, albeit probably inaccurate, concept of my past, present, and future. There are even some year off options that are pretty well understood, like doing an internship or traveling. They are considered intrinsically noble pursuits, and don’t require too much more explanation.

Because I don’t have any one theme to tie up the semester, my answer becomes a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. Like all chaotic systems, the conversation is extremely sensitive to initial conditions. If I’m feeling up to a longer conversation, the mention the web startup that I’m currently working on. Naturally, this leads to endless questions about what it does and how (I will be posting about it as soon as I get some of the final basics settled.) The medium-length solution is to get into the Solar Decathlon, and hope that if I tell them enough stories about things I have done, they’ll forget to ask about what I’m currently doing. Finally, I could deflect the question by saying “Oh, pretty much just hanging around”. In my experience, this will generally kill the conversation after a few more awkward exchanges .

It’s still better than having to lay out why I was in Washington DC on the MIT Solar Decathlon team, at which point I generally have to remind them that I don’t attend MIT- I just live there and build altfuel cars and houses with them. Then it turns into a discussion of why I chose Olin, and what Olin is in the first place. Which defeats the purpose of a medium-length solution.

I do enjoy telling people about what I’m doing, where I’m staying (I ❤ pika), and why attending Olin while taking advantage of the extracurriculars at MIT is the best deal in the world. But I’ve found that coming home has required me to repeatedly tell the story from the beginning (“I was at my high school college fair, and there was this one little college that nobody was paying attention to, so we went over to check it out….”) It gets old after a while. But I guess that if you wander a bit off the beaten path, everyone’s going to wonder where you’ve been, and if you fought an angry bear.

For the record, I haven’t fought any bears, but I met a massive (or, as Ben would suggest, giant) beaver…

Tim: yay campaigns

I only spent 13 hours at work today and it made me really happy. Also, Antonio Villaraigosa is pretty much awesome.

My daily caffeine intake is trending towards “probably unhealthy,” with ambitions of achieving “mildly alarming.” I have a firm new appreciation for espresso and also of the Starbucks conveniently located between the house where I’m staying and the campaign office.

Livin’ the dream!

The semester in a quote

“I always thought this college and entrepreneurship thing would be something more than sitting in a bathroom and coding while singing Spice Girls”

-Chester Macklin

(it should be noted that our office is in a bathroom which was turned into a hallway)

Tim: Tucumcari, New Mexico

Hello from Mountain Time. I have photographic evidence that there are many cows in Oklahoma. Also at that link: photos from the Clinton library!

I picked up an audiobook copy of Giving at the Clinton museum store (more on the store in a coming post) and Sondy and I listened to it in the car today. I wasn’t really what I was expecting — it’s v. much an inspired laundry list of ways to do good things in the world, and of people who are doing good things. Useful and practical, certainly, but not a ton of insight into Clinton’s life, presidency, or plans. A good listen, though, and it’ll have me thinking about giving for a while now.

Tonight, we’re in New Mexico.  The motel feels very Edward Hopper. That is all. Good-night!

Tim: Hello from Memphis!

Good morning from Memphis, Tennessee! I’m road-trippin’ it across the country to Las Vegas, NV, which is where observant Planet Olin readers will have noticed that I’m going to be working for the Hillary Clinton campaign from now through January. More on this later, probably.

It turns out that Virginia is a bigger state than I thought it was, particularly when you’re heading out the very southwest corner of it. It’s been a good drive so far; the scenery was all very pretty but nothing surprising. Tennessee is sort of like an east-west New Jersey, in that it is long and in my way.

Today’s plan: cross the Mississippi and crash the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock en route to Amarillo, TX. It promises to be an exciting day! Pictures tonight.

What I’ve been up to

I was chatting with Ben in the Foundry’s beautiful new design studio, and he mentioned that nobody reads our blog anymore. A check of our stats reveals that he’s basically right, but the truth is a little more complex:

(apologies for the pictures, wordpress doesn’t seem to do sizing very well, I’ll fix them when I get the chance)

We get hits roughly when we sent the link to Students, and then things taper off. Makes sense, except:

you’ll notice that my early post ‘How to get into and out of Boston‘ seems to be doing really well. Now, there are a lot of people that want to get out of Boston, but this is a little suspicious. A look at the next chart helped shed some light on the issue:

 

So it appears that we’ve basically been reduced to a server for jpgs of the New York Subway (which I used in the Boston post). Still, a look at the first graph reminds us that Tim’s valiant posts from the front lines of the Virginia fight for equal rights are not going unnoticed. And if it’s Virginians that are looking for the subway maps, they’ve hit the jackpot!

But the rest of us have largely failed our goal of keeping an up to date record of our many adventures in LOAville. Part of the problem for me has been the feeling that I shouldn’t write about something until I’ve posted about the stuff leading up to it, but never having time to complete this huge task. So I’m punting. Here’s a summary of what I’ve done so far in this term:

• Did research towards starting a company to temporarily install environmental sensors into people’s homes (very similar to what the FBE group is doing now. I was initially annoyed, but then I realized it was free market research!)
• Did the temperature/humidity measurement and control for the MIT Solar7, and ended up with the house in Washington DC for about 2 weeks during the competition. All of the MITers were trying to balance their time in DC with their classwork, so they were really happy to have somebody who could pay attention to all of the readouts without interruption. By the time the awards ceremony came around, I was one of the only ones who hadn’t gone home, so I got to accept the certificate! (In my Olin shirt, of course)
• Recovered with a self-scheduled long weekend home in New York
• Am currently working towards my goal of becoming a mediocre web designer. I’ve got some friends who support themselves entirely through freelance web design, and while I don’t want to do it for the rest of my life, it seems like a good skill to have. Additionally, it’s so much cheaper to start a web-based company than any other kind, and you’d be surprised at how many of them do modestly well without being the next Google or Youtube.
• I’m thinking about getting a real internship for next term. Possibilities include Johnson Controls, which does building energy efficiency, and Digital Design and Imaging Service, which basically involves taking awesome pictures from a mobile, tethered balloon. I was lucky enough to catch them working in NYC, and they let me take some shots of the Manhattan skyline at 100ft, during sunset. It was amazing.

Now you know all about me. I’ll hopefully post some more details on these or future adventures, but it’s time to hop the Wellesley bus!

ps if you’re here for links to the Subway map, scroll down.

pps Unless you’re looking at this on PlanetOlin, in which case you should still scroll down, because the other posts are going to be better.

Tim: Famous on the Interblag, Part II

Another post!, this time about the campaign rally we had at George Mason University in Fairfax, which was BTW pretty frickin’ awesome. When HRC webmail comes back online, I’ll post the picture of me standing directly between Governor Kaine and former Governor slash rockstar Mark Warner. 😀 😀 😀

I’m posting from the Barney Bus — from which we have made more than 10,500 calls today — right now, typing in between calls. The autodialer leaves a recorded message when answering machines pick up, and they had me record the message for tomorrow’s push. My name and voice are about to be on Democratic answering machines all across Fairfax County! :OOO Famous on the Interblag and the ansaphone! Ahh, my friends. The campaign life is a good life.

Though it’s one that’ll be over soon — polls will open in less than ten hours’ time! Exciting? Oh yes. Virginia! Show me what you can do! (<^_^)V

Tim: Famous on the Interblag

I wrote a post for HRC Backstory about the SEIU’s Mobile Action Center (“Barney Bus”), which is a predictive dialing phone-banking beast. Good times!

Of course, it turns out it’s MAC-2 sitting outside, not MAC-1, but what do I know.