Check out what happens when you leave Starbucks cream out for a weekend! You get Starbucks Cheese!

Well, besides the cheese I made by leaving the cream out for 3 or 4 days, I have a few things to complain about the big coffee guys. As you might know, I visit Starbucks quite frequently. I stop at whichever location is closest to me at the time when I leave a client’s site or when I want to get out of the house and get some work done.

Recently they closed down one of the shops I visit the most. The store was closed for approximately 14 days for renovation. About five days after they reopened, I went back to check it out. What a disappointment, they renovated the store alright; it looks nice, new, clean, brighter and more appealing. The problem is that they removed 20-30% of the area where you could sit down and enjoy your beverage! There used to be 6 round tables, and a handicapped table, with enough chairs for each table corresponding to its size. Now there are only 3 small tables and the handicapped table.

Wouldn’t Starbucks as the store owner want people to hang out in the shop? When I went in the last time, I decided to get my drink and go home since all the tables were occupied. Had I stayed in the store, I would have spent 10 - 15 dollars over 2-3 hours. Instead, I bought my drink and left. It seems that they don’t want customers to hang around. This is not cool, I hope they evaluate these decisions more throughly in the future. Besides keeping their bottom line, they should also consider the customers that bring them repeated business!

When I read a book, lately I’ve been very diligent about going back and reviewing some of the key points on each chapter. After much reading, I found that sometimes it is hard to find passages I highlighted and might want to come back later. So I keep a running list of notes on the book itself.

Words I’ve never seen, new reading material, and comments on each chapter are the 3 main types of notes I take. Some of my books have sections highlighted, underlined, or starred and this helps a lot when revisiting the books. But you can only scribble so much on the margin. The lack of space in the margin and the tedious task of flipping through pages I’ve already read when I want to review something, pushed me to come up with a this very simple review-as-you-go method.

Whenever I start a new book now, I take a big block of post-it notes, the ones that are like 4×6. I then take one post-it and stick it on the inside cover, then one at the end of each chapter. The one behind the front cover serves me to write down words I don’t know. The one after each chapter makes it easy to write a few notes to summarize what I’ve read. If needed, sometimes I add more pages as I go.

Don’t get me wrong, I still write all over my books. Some people consider scribbling on books somewhat of an irreverent practice, but I don’t care; it helps me retain more content when I read. I wouldn’t for example write in a nice dictionary, encyclopedia or coffee table book. But all other types of books go.

Hey, anyone want to join me on this reading adventure? If you want to read any of the books I have listed and want someone to discuss them with, shoot me an e-mail. I’ll be happy to do some talking about them with you as we read them. Or use the comments on my posts to voice out your thoughts, opinions and the like, I promise I’ll respond to each comment.

I was sick a good part of last week and earlier this week so I got plenty of time to read while the flu got the best of me.

I have now completed two more books directly off the list I posted earlier this month:

Into The Wild, by Jon Krakauer and The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs.

I was initially going to post my commentary for both books all in one article but I thought that each deserved their own little post. If you’re interested on my thoughts about the books, you can read them here and here respectively.

After all the responses I got from my post about Bank of America’s new ATM. I decided to do a little reading and give you guys some commentary.

These new ATMs are called Deposit Image ATMs, and if you do a search for nearby locations on BofA’s website, you will see that they’ve conveniently added a note to highlight their existence. Other banks may call them “envelope-less.” These machines have been around in pilot programs at least since 2006, probably even 2005 if not earlier.

Unfortunately, the people that actually took the time to comment on my site aren’t generally happy about these new ATMs. Some of them even threaten with leaving Bank of America altogether because of their experiences. I can’t blame them. I don’t like playing with my money, and I like it even less when my bank wants to play with it. On the other hand, I personally have not had any actual problems with BoA. I have been disappointed at times with a few issues, but I chalked those up to the standard cost of business; after all, you can’t expect any business to be 100% perfect all the time, for all their customers. The issues I’ve had with them were more about their customer service, and a one time fee that I didn’t agree with and they refused to remove. At this point I consider these new ATMs more of a novelty than anything so the fact that they are sometimes unavailable is not a problem for me. It just makes me wonder about the people in charge. The people that make decisions to roll this stuff out. Why not test them? Why not put procedures in place for proper maintenance? And why let ATMs remain broken for weeks or even months? This happens with all the banks I’ve had, and BoA is still by far the best bank I deal with.

So what’s the scoop with these new machines? Here’s Bank of America’s spin on it:

No envelopes or deposit slips needed. There is no need to add up the total deposits beforehand. Insert cash or checks (one at a time) into the ATM. You will receive an image of each check on your receipt.

All of this followed by their current slogan, Just another way we bring “Higher Standards“.

So here are my thoughts on this stuff:

Continue Reading “Follow up: Bank of America new ATM” »

A few days ago I shared my reading list, and The end of Faith was at the top of the list. I’d finish this by Wednesday or so. I actually finished it on Tuesday while drinking a white chocolate mocha at Starbucks. I’ve been working on a cool project to giveaway a bad ass prize to a lucky winner, and the details were a little overwhelming, so I needed a break. I opened my backpack to see if I had packed something else to do. I found the book. Continue Reading “I finished the first one! The end of faith.” »

Have you heard of the new Microsoft Surface?

the video is just a spoof of the real thing. It looks cool… but I remember seeing a video 2-3 years ago with multitouch capabilities for something similar. It was pretty advanced IMO… but seriously… thats it? Microsoft’s real video keeps talking about “in the future….” how about now? with basically an unlimited supply of cash, I would expect a better product. Not an advert for a product we’ll see in the future. If a group of students got a great working prototype with multi-touch capabilities over 3 years ago, wouldn’t you expect multi-touch? wouldn’t you expect most of these capabilites “now”?  Hmm… we can already map a route and plan a trip and send it to our phones, without a big ass table to do it from.  Who feels that a stack of cluttered pictures is how a professional photo editor would work?

This is hardly even amusing. The spoof is funny though.

the real thing is at microsoft.com/surface