Customer: Do you drink coffee?
Barista: I work at a Starbucks. You’ve gotta stay buzzed somehow.

(During Comikaze Expo.)

• SMBC: Where does the time go when you play online games?
• XKCD: Server Attention Span
• The Joy of Tech: The Internet is running out of tubes. (via @brionv)
• Classic Spamusement: They hold a whole lot of it. I had no idea….
• Bizarro on Facebook slacktivism (at Failblog).

Sci-fi and fantasy:

• Keeping Up With the Cardassians. For months, this is what I heard every time someone mentioned the Kardashians. (What can I say? My brain is more attuned to Star Trek than to reality TV.)
• Author Robert J. Sawyer answers pointed questions about Flashforward and the TV adaptation, including what went wrong. I have to agree that it was really hurt by focusing too heavily on the conspiracy arc.

Coolness!

• Discovery spacewalk seen from the ground (Thierry Legault, of course!)
• Majestic Snow Batman towers over Vermont
• Ultra hi-res moon. The full-sized image is 24,000 x 24,000 pixels and half a gigabyte!
• Flash Coffee is a product tie-in just waiting to happen! (That F’ing Monkey). It would fit right in with the Central City Track Team shirt.

Tech stuff:

• Gmail accidentally reset thousands of accounts last month. (They got it back — this is Google after all.) I’ve come to rely heavily on Gmail, but I still keep a local copy of all my email in case something like this happens. (Engadget, via @pobox)
• 6 ways to use public Wi-Fi hot spots safely (C|NET).
• Mobile Content Is Twice as Difficult (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
• Map of smartphone marketshare by OS & manufacturer. It’s a 3-way split between iPhone, Android and Blackberry. iPhone & Blackberry are of course one manufactuer, while Android is divided mainly among HTC, Samsung and Motorola. (via @androidandme)
• Things Real People Don’t Say About Your App or website (via @brionv)

• You put a filter in the coffee maker, then go back to get…a filter for the coffee maker. And then put the bag of coffee back in the fridge…where you’ve never kept coffee. Ever. (Yeah, I was batting 1,000 that day.)
• You get halfway up the stairs before realizing you left your travel mug in the car. (I’ve done this several times.)
• You get impatient with the pour rate while filling your mug.
• You pour cereal into your coffee mug instead of a bowl. (Well, almost.)
• You come up with a great item to add to your “You know you need coffee when…” list and can’t remember what it was.

Coffee + hot chocolate mix = mocha

Coffee + hot chocolate mix + cinnamon

Hot chocolate mix + mint-flavored black tea

Hot chocolate mix + cinnamon-flavored black tea

Hot chocolate mix + masala chai tea

Since I realized that this was more of a list of what you can do with hot chocolate mix, I’ve been meaning to fill in more detail for…well, months now. Apparently today is National Coffee Break Day, so I figured rather than letting it sit in the drafts folder forever, I’d post what I had in observance!

• It’s only on iced drinks. Iced tea, lemonade, iced lattes, etc. Unless you’re getting plain iced coffee, you’re not getting 31 ounces of fully-caffeinated coffee.
• Even then, there’s ice taking up a lot of that space. So you’re still not getting 31 ounces of coffee.
• You can get a 32-ounce drink in any fast food place in America. Sometimes it’s called a large. Sometimes it’s called a medium.

A 31-ounce Frappucino might be a bit much…but how much do you typically get in a milkshake at a restaurant that specializes in them? I’m going to guess it’s 12-16 ounces in the glass, plus about the same in the metal mixing cup that they usually deliver to your table at places like Ruby’s or Johnny Rockets. That brings it to 24-32 ounces — in other words, about the same.

So, a little perspective. Is the Trenta bigger than any other Starbucks drink size? Sure. But compared to a Big Gulp? No one would think twice if you picked up a 32-ounce iced tea or lemonade at McDonald’s (except to ask why you weren’t getting a soda), or refilled your 12-ounce glass twice at a sit-down restaurant.

• Help! My Half-Elf is Pregnant! – The 11 strangest Dungeons and Dragons questions from the “Sage Advice” Column
• 15 things worth knowing about coffee by The Oatmeal.
• Photos: When Niagra Falls Ran Dry

And now some techie stuff:

• Interesting idea: Paper.li extracts links posted by Twitter and Facebook accounts you follow, then creates a daily newspaper page featuring headlines, links and excerpts from the top stories.
• Who Came Up With Computer Symbols?
• Thomas Hawk’s Open Letter to Carol Bartz, CEO Yahoo Inc. on why Yahoo! should consider Flickr a core product.
• Firefox made of LEGO

Edit: Not a link, but I should mention: between a bug in Akismet and me not having time to go through it, I ended up with more than 2,000 comments in the spam folder just from the last 3 weeks. I don’t have time to look through that many items for false positives, so I just cleared it all out. If you left a legitimate comment that hasn’t shown up on the site, I apologize.

Comic Strips

• I found a printout of this User Friendly comic strip while cleaning out my old desk last month. Ah, tech support! Help, I can’t send e-mail!
• XKCD on spambots vs. constructive comments (warning: language)
• Two comic strips about book collections: Wondermark and Girl Genius. I stumbled on the Wondermark strip at Long Beach Comic-Con (write-up should be done today is online) and it really hit home, between the fact that I grew up loving books for exactly this reason, and the impending arrival of the next generation. As for Girl Genius, I think Castle Heterodyne’s library could give the Beast’s a run for its money.
• Fake Science explains the difference between regular and decaf coffee. Insert obligatory “It was ground this morning” joke.
• C-Section Comics shows the difference between iPhone, Android and Blackberry users. For the record: Android user, picked up the link from an iPhone user. Hmm…

Photos

• Incredible star trails and a derelict ship at APOD.
• Usability study: Photos as Web Content (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
• Amazing close-up photos of comet Hartley 2.
• Twitter Fail Whale Hat.

Other Stuff

• Someone wants to buy a cosmic treadmill from me: Umm…Not For Sale?
• Wrapping up Cyber Security Awareness Month at @sans_isc. If you use a computer, you should at least take the time to look through this.
• Gotta love the MPAA’s priorities. A brief scene of therapeutic swearing earns the same rating as an entire film full of graphic, gruesome torture: The King’s Speech vs. Saw 3D.

I never quite made it this year, though I came close on Saturday before lunch.

I ended up walking by a coffee stand set up outside Lion Coffee. Two years ago, the site had been a Starbucks, before the chain started mass-closing their stores. (Now they’re only on every other corner.) Last year, Lion was in the process of converting this location, but hadn’t actually opened yet. Shrewdly, they had set up a table outside, selling coffee from urns and drinks from a cooler.

This year, they were open, but had set up a table around the corner to catch people walking by. It worked. They didn’t have any iced coffee outside, but the clerk handed me a dollar-off coupon for asking, and I ended up getting a really good iced mocha inside!

Me: I’d like an iced chai, medium. I mean grande.
Barista: It’s OK, I speak both languages.

(At the hotel coffee shop during Westercon.)

Even better, the rest of the convention center was taken up by a coffee convention! (For the uninitiated: There’s a running gag in the current Flash relaunch about how much coffee people drink in Central City…especially Iris Allen.)

Follow-up: read my full convention report and check out my photos.