Tumblelogs, Microserfs, and Starbucks water

Submitted by jessetrucks on Tue, 2008-10-07 14:18
in

So, in the spirit of building the habit of posting, even if it isn't the long, thoughtful, well-researched pieces I so much love to read, as I said in my last post, I bring my stream of consciousness blog entry today.

So, I was suffering from an unusually bad case of exhaustion and sleepiness at work. The solution was to go get a red-eye from the little cafe in the basement of the building. They use Starbucks service. Every time I get handed a cup of freshly brewed Starbucks coffee, even with a little java jacket thing around the cup, it's so hot it burns my fingers.

This reminded me of the 1985 Douglas Coupland novel Microserfs. Everyone in IT or Gen X or younger ought to read it. Coupland's prescient commentary on Microsoft and dot.com life in generally right on. The reason i thought of this novel in particular, though, is the commentary on how hot Starbucks coffee is. I wanted to find the quote from the book that is relevant, so I started googling around to find it. The exact quote is found on the Critical Mass blog entry from May 2006:

From "Microserfs:"

I think Starbucks has patented a new configuration of the water molecule, like in a Kurt Vonnegut novel, or something. This molecule allows their coffee to remain liquid at temperatures over 212 Farenheit. How do they get their coffee so hot? It takes hours to cool off -- it's so hot it's undrinkable -- and by the time it's cool, you're sick of waiting for it to cool and that "coffee moment" has passed.

Of course, while searching for this little gem (and drinking the life sustaining coffee), I stumbled across something new (to me): tumbleblogs. Apparently the term was coined in a Red Handed post back in 2005. That officially puts me more than three years behind the curve on this one.

Back when it was easy to be on the bleeding edge, I was usually there hemorrhaging gleefully with the other early adopters. Now, I'm usually a little behind with the new safety blade version of the cutting edge, right before the blunt edges come out.

Will this become a tumblog? I guess time will tell.