Category: Life

Posted on
by

Remember Mozilla Coffee? In the first month they offered it, RJ Tarpley’s Coffee raised $400 for the Mozilla Foundation by donating a percentage of the profits.

We ordered it a couple of times, and it was actually pretty good. I even picked up a Mozilla Coffee Mug at one point.

Alas, the website (formerly www.rjtarpleys.com) has vanished. There isn’t even a whois record anymore. I don’t know if the company went out of business or just shut down their web operations.

All I know is that Mozilla Coffee is no more. That, and I seem to have a collector’s-item mug.

Originally posted on my Spread Firefox blog.

Update: Ron Tarpley himself commented on my post at SFX on 12/15/2005:

Hey Kelson,

I just happened to stumble across this entry today. You are right, I did shut down the Coffee biz and Mozilla Coffee with it. It was and still is an awesome idea. My problem was order fullfillment. The roaster thought he could have a program in place to fullfill orders (packaging, labels, shipping, etc.) When that fell through, I ended up doing this in my garage at midnight and 5:00 am while trying to maintain my real job, be a husband, and a father! I held on for as long as I could because the coffee is awesome and folks like part of the profit going to The Foundation. I will explore this again with my roaster (they are expanding successfully in the South) and the great folks at Mozilla. Who knows, if this can be done better this time I think it could be huge. Combining Mozilla (Firefox) and Coffee……what could be better?

Ron Tarpley

Posted on
by

You know how you see some numbers in one context so often that you think of that meaning when you see them somewhere else? Seriously: If you’ve spent a lot of time on the web and you notice the clock reading 4:04, or a price coming up as $4.04, etc., chances are you find it funny, right? It’s like realizing that someone’s initials are A.T.M.

Well, I was looking at the Star Wars Trilogy on Amazon and noticed it had 1394 reviews:

Star Wars: See all 1394 customer reviews

I saw that number, and my mind instantly thought “Firewire.”

(Yes, the question of the day is, “How can I make a post about Star Wars even more geeky?”)

Posted on
by

My dresser is an IKEA kit and was something of a bear to assemble. The second drawer down has recently developed the annoying habit of not closing on the first go, and I feel a strange obligation to fix it but I’m not sure how. It’d be nice if the stuff would come with more instructions for maintenance.

So this gets me thinking: IKEA furniture is Lego for grown-ups. You go to the store, look at the cool pictures, and pick up a box of parts to make the model you want. When you get it home and open the box, sometimes the picture inside doesn’t look like what you saw in the store, but you think, “Oh, what the hell, I’ll make it anyway, maybe I’ll figure out how to make the other thing later.” So you count up all the little pieces and lay them out and once in a while there’s some stuff missing but you always have extras around because every other set you have included the same interchangeable parts and didn’t need them all. When you start assembling it, you’re just about guaranteed to miss a step or do something out of order and have a tough time getting the pieces apart to put them back together right. And when you’re done, part of the enjoyment of having the finished product around is looking at it and thinking, “Hey, look what I made!”

Posted on
by

For quite a while now, the always-excellent This Is True newsletter has been advertising writer Randy Cassingham’s latest (?) project: JumboJoke, a weblog-style daily joke post. I finally took a look at it, and thought I’d share the following pair of lists based on our political parties’ often contradictory platforms and rhetoric:

Posted on
by

I experienced a bit of cognitive dissonance earlier today. I was listening to a report on The World (PRI) about the bombing of the Australian embassy in Jakarta, and a reporter (Stephen McConnell) was explaining the Australian political situation for an American audience. (Why? They’ve got an election coming up in a month. Comparisons to the Madrid bombing should be obvious at this point.)

He explained, “It’s a two-horse race. You’ve got the conservatives, who in this country are called the Liberals, and then there’s the Labor Party, which would be much more aligned to something like the Democrats…”

It’s a lot more complicated, of course, but the idea of conservatives calling themselves liberals just seemed bizarre, considering that the terms are opposites here in the US. For all practical purposes, conservative and liberal are swear words when used by someone of the opposite ideology!

»All pages site-wide with this tag