I find myself this evening at a Starbucks in Van Nuys, drinking a coffee, watching dozens of people who are not drinking coffee, or any sort of drink actually, play very bad games of chess.

There are two points to this very short post, and it is a very short post with only two points, I guarantee that. The first is the aficionado ethos that many Starbucks devotees adhere to. I find it interesting that so many people profess to be coffee lovers yet frequent Starbucks. I understand why, it’s the comfort factor, the same reason you are still wearing those worn out sneakers and the underwear with the holes in it.

It’s the “consistent experience” where you don’t have to think too much but have the illusion of choice and comfortable alternatives to your usual drink.

I’ve been saying this for years, Starbucks is to coffee what McDonald’s is to the hamburger. If you want a great hamburger, you don’t go to McDonald’s. But if you want a consistent hamburger…

If you truly, really love coffee, you don’t go to Starbucks, you visit any one of the dozens of local roasters in your metropolitan area.

If you’re lucky enough to be in Los Angeles, visit a local Groundworks. If you’re really lucky to be in Venice, visit the Groundworks on Rose Ave. And if you are especially lucky, you’ll get Chris pulling the espresso shots for you.

And the really bad chess? People sacrifice too early for cheap victories or rush in to a situation without understanding the ramifications of the harm they are about to do to themselves. I find chess to be a perfect allegory for people’s lives, careers, goals, aspirations and their pursuit of get rich quick schemes.

Enjoy your coffee. I have to go now, I am about to be put in check because I was writing this and not paying attention to my game.

ShareThis

Last week I was in Las Vegas for DevConnections and the launch of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. Normally you won’t catch me dead in Las Vegas along The Strip due to all of the tourists, the constant cigarette smoke and the pervasive heat.

This trip did not turn out so bad. I went in the early part of the year where the temperature is the mid-sixties, beginning of the week so there are few tourists, and of course, with that, very little cigarette smoke.

What was great about this trip was not having to work too hard. I did not need to talk to clients, I was not having to go out every day and sell the services of my company, and I did not have to cover a huge conference as a member of the press. Just a nice, quiet, relaxing little conference talking to vendors and software developers and other business people.

It was the most relaxing time I have spent in the past three months, anywhere. Almost like a mini-vacation. Plus I got a huge amount of time to think and write about personal development. But no gambling. I refrained from playing Blackjack this trip, though I did lose about forty bucks on the penny slots whilst waiting for my girlfriend.

The last day of my trip I was able to make it over to visit a friend’s house and take a look at the architect’s plans for the new house they are building. What was fun about that was discussing all of the ideas they had for the literal castle in the air that they are building.

One thing i did realise though was that you can take the geek out of the ghetto but not the ghetto out of the geek.

My friends live on a double-gated country club community where everything is planned and not a blade of grass is out of place. I found it very depressing actually and the whole area set my teeth on edge. But what I found most amusing was that these two wonderful people still lived like traditional sci-fi/technology geeks with stacks of books just haphazardly piled up wherever they would go and a toilet cistern that didn’t quite work.

During a walk across the casino floor of the Bellagio I had a particularly interesting philosophical conversation that I really need to write up in to a post. But what was most striking about this conversation was that I did not record it in any way, shape or fashion. Every recording device I had on me at the time decided to pick that exact moment to stop working. My little SONY voice recorder, my SenseCam, my cell phone.

Everything.

I had this sudden mental disconnection of “should I talk about this if I’m not recording it? What if I forget something I said? What if I don’t talk about it now but then forget to talk about it later?”

I was struck dumb (but only for a brief moment) by this quandary of suddenly being completely disconnected from the world and recording nothing at all.

Will future generations suffer angst at not recording, at not being connected, at being isolated from the world? I wrote about this in a post-singularity short story years ago but I experienced it first-hand for myself in a very real sense, right there, on the casino floor, in the most mundane of settings I could imagine.

ShareThis