Living in rural America you are not likely to find a Starbucks, Target, Cosco, movie multiplex, Home Depot, Trader Joes, commercial airport, or a wide range of fine dining and entertainment hotspots “just around the corner”. More likely they are 90 miles in one direction or another. What you will find is a collection of family owned and operated small businesses serving an eclectic range of needs. One example is the Machipongo Trading Company with their local coffees from Eastern Shore Coastal Roasting Co.

The owners of Eastern Shore Coastal Roasting Co. have a solid range of coffees they have blended and roasted themselves and are not just some repackaged bulk purchase from “elsewhere”. What’s even better is they love to hear what people think and want. Kristen and James use treat their coffee just like a microbrewery treats their beer. You might even call them a “micro-roaster”. What is so great is that a micro-roaster can do small batches – all the way down to 7lbs. With this little tidbit, I contacted Kristen and setup an appointment to visit and talk about coffee !

Coffee has more distinct flavors than wines – most quote, “more than 700 flavor constituents”. Knowing what you like is one thing. Describing it is much harder.

Anyway, Kristen first had me try each of the blends they had available (over a period of weeks – not all in one day). Then I cam back with my comments. From that information, she selected and roasted three single-origin beans – Guatemalan, Sumatra Mandheling, and El Salvador Peaberry – as well as their house blend. They ground all to the same consistency and it was back to taste testing at home.

The first few days were tough.

• Day 1 – make a single espresso shot of each and taste side by side “strait up”. Serious buzzing ensured.
• Day 2 – make a single espresso shot of each with a measured amount of whole milk and taste side by side “strait up”. Again, serious buzzing ensured.
• Day 3 – repeat Day 1 with a 1/2oz of chocolate syrup in each (this is what I enjoyed while in Rome a few years back). Sadly, less buzzing ensured which meant I was adjusting to the mega dosage.
• Day 4 – blend 50/50 of Guatemalan and Sumatra Mandheling and add milk. Fortunately the withdrawal was not as bad as expected but I definitely did not want to escalate back to 4 shots before 8AM.
• Day 5 – blend 50/50 of Guatemalan and El Salvador Peaberry and add milk.
• Day 6 – blend 50/50 of Sumatra Mandheling and El Salvador Peaberry and add milk.
• Day 7..10 – I was traveling
• Day 11 – blend 1/3 each and add milk.
• Day 12 – make a mocha from the Day 4 blend.
• Day 13 – make a mocha from the Day 4 blend using a different espresso machine
• Day 14 – make a mocha from the house blend

So, now I have my notes from all of the above (along with a serious caffeine addiction). It’s time to return the Machipongo Trading Company for a tasty breakfast and a conversation with Kristen. Soon, theSalmonFarm may have it’s own signature coffee !

  There are a few things that must be inspected before an occupancy permit can be issued. One of those is has nothing to do with floors, walls, running water, or electricity. It does have to do with safety – in it’s own way.

The farmhouse is project now has it’s official 911 address displayed out at the road �

In the vast stretches of farmland it’s not uncommon to just get a box at the local post office. Still, the address must be clearly displayed. The solution is the "address post". In my case, my 911 number is #31368.

Here was this excellent internet article about MediaMall’s PlayOn steaming server which now had been tested with Network Media Tank / Popcorn Hour (NMT and PCH respectively). I thought, "Wow – I could watch some TV shows from Hulu and if that worked, then Netflix On Demand video would be a real option for me".

I already have a Hulu account and there is a 14 day trial of PlayOn so I thought "why not?". I downloaded and installed it.

My first lament was that PlayOn is MS Windows only so I’d have to keep a PC running. But, if it did everything in the video testimonial, it’d be worth it.

My second lament was it reported in it "system requirements" to be very internet heavy. I could not imagine why it needed 1.5 – 2.0 mbps to function. Hulu makes this recommendation and it seems to work pretty well with my DSL service. Since, PlayOn is just receiving a Hulu stream and it is the local PC that needs horsepower to transcode and stream to the PCH, I would expect PlayOn to be as good a native Hulu.

PlayOn has a convenient setup interface that confirms account settings and even checks your network connectivity. Now, why it checks my internet performance EVERYTIME I OPEN THE SETTINGS is beyond me. But it always reported "low" in brilliant red. Just to compare, I ran a few DSL speed tests and downloaded some files. Those tests were all in the 1.2 – 1.7 mbps range and yet, PlayOn called foul.

True to its report, PlayOn performed horrifically. So, while my internet and local net were fine, PlayOn said they were bad and performed as such.

I�ve concluded that the only reliable solution is one which lets me queue up my interested content and download as internet bandwidth allows. I�m fine with this approach but the services don�t seem to get the fact that they are catering to the elite. For the record, the United States FCC defines broadband as anything above 768 kbit/s.

Commentary: I guess I can see why Netflix tries to limit its bandwidth usage and/or attempts to match your internet connection capabilities. For TV programs, that�s probably fine (most of the time). Still, what I�d like is the option to buffer the entire program/movie � I�d be happy to tell Netflix in the morning that I want to watch a movie that night and get it downloaded and stored in advance. If I�m just looking to �vegg-out� then I�d be wiling take the best quality stream I could get given my bandwidth. But that�s not how they work � it�s streamed or nothing.

I did a bit of PHP coding this weekend (cue screams by programmers and a development managers everywhere). I liked Windows Live Writer the first time I ran it through it’s paces and now I like it even more. There is one serious caveat. The images that WLW creates and uploads are a bit “rich”. What I mean by that is they are bigger than they really need to be.

When I use GIMP and even Postie, I use a JPEG quality setting of 75. This seems to make reasonable small thumbnails for my blogs and even does a good job when the image is 575 px. On average, the 240px thumbnails are between 10kb and 20kb while the larger images are 50kb to 70kb. These sizes make it possible for readers using telephone modems and dial-up service to still have a chance to read the blog without falling asleep waiting for the page to load. I would like the pages to be even smaller but I use images in nearly every post so a typical page size is between 400kb and 500kb.

What I liked about WLW was that it took my basic images and create both a nice thumbnail with drop shadow effect and created all the necessary linking to the full size image. Postie did this too. The difference was I had to add the drop shadow to the big image and exaggerate it so that the thumbnail would have it when Postie scaled it down. Also, Postie make all thumbnails the same size and there was now way to control it on a post-by-post basis.

So, to get the control that I wanted I switched back to WLW but then I needed to find a fix for the larger that desirable image results. This is where that PHP comes in. I have created a crude but effective Wordpress plug-in that detects JPEG files in uploaded posts and re-compresses them automatically. I even gave it a crude name “jpeg-quality75″.

You can download jpeg-quality75 here if you are interested. The install is very simple – unzip then upload jpeg-quality75.php to your Wordpress plug-ins directory and activate it. It has not admin or settings.

The plug-in works by hooking the wp_handle_upload function in Wordpress. This function is called for every file uploaded, the plug-in checks if the file type is a JPEG image and if so, locates the image, opens and re-compresses it using a quality setting of 75, and then stores the result back in the original location, overwriting the original. It leaves PNG and GIF files alone.

I’ll be checking it’s results for a few days but it seems to be doing a good job without corrupting my photos and graphics.

Hey again. This started as a letter to a friend of mine who will be headed this way in a few weeks …

I was about to call it a night and a mash of things took place. I was brushing my teeth and thinking; “when he arrives, should I tell him that the evening news is downloaded and watched at 9:30pm, the living room lights go off at 9:45pm, video streaming and computers start to shut off at 10pm, the hallway lights comes at 9:55pm and off by 10:15pm and then things start up automatically again in the morning with the computers waking up at 6am, the lights in the bedroom by 6:20 and in the office at 6:45am so on”. Then there is the fact that the drafty old farmhouse thermostat is set at 62 because much more is like watching money fly out the windows.

In the midst of all of this, something else hit me, a Beatles tune. I couldn’t even figure out which one. So I scrolled through the few Beatles songs on the iPod …because it’s obviously after 10pm and the majority of computer systems have already shut down. I didn’t find the one that I was thinking of but I hit “Dear Prudence” followed by “Eleanor Rigby”, “I am the Walrus”, and so on. It was cool.

Are we getting old ?

My routine is more routine and yet I don’t really mind it. My taste in music may be all over the map and yet I have discovered that the music of the 60’s was actually pretty good and there are even a bunch of stuff from the 70’s to discover. (I am still sane enough to not talk about the 80’s). Freddy Mercury was talented. Early Stones had less wrinkles. Frank actually could sing before he got the aura of a high class mob king pin.

Houses were stamped from cookies cutters. Fences where white. and streets were safe for playing stick ball and riding bikes. The president got in trouble. NASA went up in flames. Peace was in jeopardy. Politics became a chess (or pawn) game. Gas prices went through the roof. The war was unpopular. Japanese cars were king. The divide grew between the haves and the have nots. New drugs were highly desirable and the makers were criminal. TV was flexing its control over the ever more malliable consumer. There was talk of [the] U2 . The power of equality was spoken of in small towns across America.

They say everything that is old is new again. Are we getting old ? You tell me. I’m having a senior moment and don’t really care.