Efficiency Trick

I am focusing on just a couple of things this week. My Firefox browser bar had drop down bookmark folders going all the way across the screen.

A bunch of them were for subjects that have been inactive for a good while.

So, I created a browser bar folder named "Inactive" and dropped them all in!

Now, I can get to them but they are not cluttering up my view.

Simple explanation for Starbuck's downturn this year

By now it is common knowledge - and old news that Starbucks announced this summer they are closing hundreds of their coffee shops around the U.S.

Here is something I discovered at some point in the 2000s that I never tried in the 1990s.

If you heat your coffee up extra hot in the microwave, and then add about an eighth to a quarter cup of cold milk from the fridge to it, you get a beverage that tastes just like the Starbuck's fancy latte coffee drink.

The trick is you have to make sure the coffee is a little stronger than usual. You have to leave some water out in order to make up for the milk you are adding.

That cup of coffee costs you small change to make. Starbucks cup of coffee costs about a fiver these days.

Bottom line is Starbucks has raised the price of a cup of coffee with milk in it until it is fantastically higher than the cost of making something similar yourself. The difference between 30 cents and 6 bucks is huge!

Granted, if you are a conniseur there is a difference. Most people are not conneseurs. They go into Starbucks thanks to marketing and convenience. If they try to duplicate most of the taste of a Starbuck's cup off coffee, they will succeed.

I think Starbucks created a bubble and kept inflating it with higher prices. For a long time, it worked. Then, the bubble burst.

Anybody else tried to whip up there own cafe au lai or latte-like tasting coffee drink at home and been satisfied with the result?

cutting back on web/internet subscriptions

I started using the Internet nearly fifteen years ago.

When I first started using it there was not much on it. That was years before Google came along. Even before Netscape - let alone Mozilla - existed.

In fact, Yahoo did not exist until 1995 - and I started using the Internet before that!

Mainly, I used the Internet for email, to learn new things, and to practice creating HTML. I got very good at that.

Later, since I am a software developer, I used it to learn newer programming techniques/languages, as a reference, and learning about the "latest stuff".

When social web came out, I tried it out.

I joined a dozen or so social web sites so I could learn some things.

Good ways to do user interface design. Good, handy features for a web site to include. What kind of features were becoming pretty much expected of web sites. And finally, to get or record a little useful information for my own sake.

A few years ago, I noticed my email inbox was getting glutted with unread emails from news from several news sites.

So l started unsubscribing to those newsletters and as of last year I stopped getting any such daily or weekly news summaries.

I think now I am at with the web where I was with email news subscriptions a year or so ago.

This week, I have been cutting back on the amount of information I gradually got subscribed to on the web itself.

A phenomenon I have noticed is that when you first start using a social web site, you tend to subscribe to a lot of stuff. That is because you are exploring. You are in "learning" mode.

Then you settle in to sort of a "use" mode. You already know how the site works, you are using what you know to get useful information out of it or maybe even put some useful information into it. You might add a few more people or whatever to the list of what you are tracking.

But each year, you use that site less and less. Until finally, you are just visiting that site a few times a year.

There comes a time where you just need to go back and gut the excess tracking items you have set up. That is what I have done.

I think I am in the kind of final stage of early-adopterdom. The "been there, done that" stage.

A fair number of sites I have used a lot in the past half decade are still around and still pretty good sites.

However, they are just things I would use once in a great while. Most of the social web sites I checked out and used a lot back when they were new, I just visit once every few months or a couple of times a year now.

I wonder if that matches the experience of a lot of people who started checking out the "social web" when it popped up in the early/mid-2000s?

For me, I think that the web is going to go back to being what it was for me in the beginning . That is, a place to get technical information about writing the latest kinds of programs, and to practice and showcase that expertise.