cafes, communication, and more
Mecca Coffee. Shop 2, 118 Devonshire St, Surry Hills. Tiny hole in the wall, punching well above its weight for the quality of coffee, and the range of samples of single origin coffees that are on offer.
Coffee is ground to order, and expertly made. Whether you’re after a top-notch decaf latte, or the full tasting notes for a single origin. The Mirage lever machine is gone now, leaving bench space for other methods of coffee preparation.
If you’re in the area, make sure you drop in.
Campos Coffee. Shop 5, 827 George St, Ultimo 2007 [in the Devonshire tunnel]. I was excited to see this place being built as I was walking through the tunnel. There was a sense of wanting to get everything right before the grand opening.
Here you see them almost ready to launch.
After a week’s soft launch, the coffee menu board was in, and the crowds have already started to build. In general you’ll see people queueing for take-away: there’s not much seating inside, and being located in a thoroughfare means visitors aren’t planning to stay.
Owner Jake is ex-Toby’s Estate and has worked in the past for Campos. The coffee he’s putting out is of a really high standard – I keep encountering people in the Ultimo area with Campos cups, talking up the quality of this new cafe.
Decaf is really solid: among the best Campos decaf I’ve had (even in Campos’ home base in Newtown there’s a sense that decaf is not something they’re happy to be making), and I’ve been back a number of times for a visit.
Follow them on twitter –@knightscoffee
Numero Uno Coffee. 83 Regent St, Chippendale. A little off the beaten track, but likely to see some good foot traffic as the local cafe when Sydney Central apartments come online. This is one of those places that cares deeply about coffee: they have naked portafilters, and a very narrow range of menu items – mostly sweet things, but with a few sandwiches thrown in for good measure.
Coffee is really good – I haven’t had great experiences with Numero Uno before, but whether they’ve lifted their game, or it’s just the extra attention to detail given here, it’s worth a look. No decaf, though: they’re not prepared to offer it, as they can’t move enough volume to keep the beans fresh.
I try not to jump on the bandwagon of blogging about what Seth Godin says on a given day, but I think this is enough of a tangent from the post that it’s okay. Seth’s you won’t benefit from anonymous criticism makes his usual valid points: anonymous critics are not writing from a place that wants you to be better at what you’re doing. It’s better not to read it.
I wouldn’t go so far as to characterise online commenters as trolls. I’ve had a lot of comments on this site over the years, and enjoyed the dialogue the vast majority of the time. In that situation – on a personal blog in particular – the comments are directed at the blog owner, or in progressing a conversation.
Mainstream media sites are a different story. The comments are often made by people in search of a large audience. When comments are more about shouting your own opinion, and shouting down the minutiae of another person who you perceive as your enemy, not your conversation partner, then there’s no communication taking place.
And so I end up with the mantra of “don’t read the comments” echoing in my head whenever I’m on a newspaper or magazine site.
Am I wrong? Have you ever been persuaded of something by reading the comments? Email me, or, you know, fill in the boxes below.
One of my favourite iPhone games is Andreas Illiger’s Tiny Wings. It’s cute, child friendly, and once you’ve bought it, there are no ads, no distractions, you get the entire thing. It’s a rarity in the App Store world, and in the online gaming world in particular. I worry that I spend too much time, even now, in my thirties, playing games. i should put them aside entirely, and focus on serious things.
When Draw Something came out, I was enthusiastic, and spent a lot of time playing it. Then Zynga (the company that owns Words with Friends and a lot of other games) bought the company (for $190M), and it started to go downhill. The tendency to extract money for players became stronger and stronger, and it felt like I had a never-ending to-do list of drawings to interpret and return.
When the privacy policy changed to be more generous toward Zynga and less toward me, I deleted it, and haven’t felt the need to go back. I can’t say the same for words with friends. I would say that I log into that game several times per day, but having bought paid version of the app, there’s not much they can do to extract further money from me, so I can concentrate on playing the game.
What I’m seeing in some other games, though, is a greater reliance on in-game currency. One game – different to bejewelled but clearly of the same lineage – is Diamond Dash.
Not only does this game have the “wait 8 minutes to be able to play again, or pay money to be able to play Right Now”, but they have two different types of in-game currency on top of this. So it’s possible to buy two lots of tokens for the game and still not have the feature that you want.
If you don’t want to pay, you can use social media to buy in-game currency, for a while. You can ask a friend to give you a life in the game, and they will receive one too. This clogs up your Facebook notifications, and theirs, but doesn’t particularly invoke positive sentiments towards the game.
These mobile devices that we use for games, and the social networks we connect them to, have so much capacity than merely to add in-game currency to existing games from the 1970s and 1980s. But we’re not seeing a lot better just yet.
I felt that Zyngapocalypse Now (And What Comes Next?) was asking some good questions about the future of gaming.
If Yahoo was “Search, Generation One” then Google was “Search, Generation Two”. The first generation was the one which became cluttered with all manner of complicated ambitions, poor performance and a whole load of “conventional wisdom” which often proved contradictory. Generation Two, on other hand, realised what mattered and delivered just that. A similar shift is what will make “Social Games, Generation Two” real.
I’m interested to see the future of gaming, but mindful that I need to be ever more disciplined in how I use my time. Future games will work even harder to make sure that players will have “just one more game”: I’m hoping I can find a way just to dip in and out, without losing hours.
A couple of diagrams that suggest a hierarchy of Internet needs – I suspect the latter diagram of trusting all your personal information to some kind of cloud is at once undesirable and inevitable.
Just what is all of this Internet use doing to our brains? (Includes some follow-up on Kony 2012).
An article from smashing magazine about doodling reminded me of how much my own thinking is limited at times from having a laptop as my main way of taking notes. Sometimes I wonder if there are advantages to some kind of hybrid moleskin / laptop approach.
Being unwell for most of this weekend marked a slight change in my normal reading routine. Instead of reading some more reformation church history for my current college subject, I started reading Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark (prior to this weekend, I’d only heard the latter as a musical). I can put this down to a podcast episode I was half listening to (TVO Big Ideas – Adam Gopnik on Christian Writers and Liberal Readers) that, at the end, talked about the hidden meanings to Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter.
Both poems I read on my iPhone, via a Google search. It’s gratifying to read something from another century, and especially to read something long-form and from another century.
A week or so ago I read a post by Jack Cheng called The Slow Web (which I first encountered via a post from Mark Bernstein). The very idea of a “slow web” jumped out from the hundreds of other things I read that day: could the web, which seems to generate multiple articles every time Apple or Twitter sneezes, be described by “Slow”?
The slow web is a movement that is making itself known. Web services that update not in milliseconds, but “sometime the next day” are an attempt to restore some humanity to the lives that we so readily throw away in pursuit of the very latest news.
But – as the article “Technology Doesn’t Ruin Our Lives,We Do” suggests – this is still a matter of choice. If it’s work that is making us stay connected to the Internet all the time, then we need to gather together as a workforce to moderate expectations and make them more liveable. There have been precedents in the time of industrial revolution – is a life spent constantly working the most valuable way that we can spend our lives? Is moving our social interaction online improving the quality of our relationships, or impoverishing them?
In a Facebook conversation with an old friend during a mutual time of insomnia, we talked about the need to make time for face-to-face conversations: having people around for a barbecue and just talking to them. The irony that this conversation could not have taken place without social media is not lost on me.
I had the chance to catch up with a friend I’ve known for over 20 years recently: it’s valuable to get that kind of perspective on life every so often. It’s one thing to muse on the question “what would my 15 year old self think of the adult I’ve become”, but there’s slightly more insight to be had to ask someone who’s known you since you were 15.
In some ways, it’s a naive question. There’s no way my 15 year old self would have a sufficiently full understanding of life to understand the decisions that I’ve made these past years. But if the answer to that question is troubling to you, it might be worth asking “what is ruining your life?” A hint. It’s probably not the technology.
For me, I’m not feeling that anything is ruining my life, and that’s a good place to be.
A rambling post about some of my thoughts from bible study tonight.
I’ve been in the group for a number of months, but I’m still getting used to being a participant in a group after many years of leading one, and a year of not going to one at all.
Tonight we looked at Galatians 6. For the last few months at church the sermons have been on Galatians, and the studies have tried to keep pace, more or less. I had my head down in my Reader’s Greek New Testament for some of the time, trying to keep my knowledge of New Testament Greek alive as much as possible.
Having a Greek bible in a bible study context is a constant tightrope walk for me. I’ve done a bunch of theological study over the years so that I can understand the bible better, but I don’t want to give the impression that (a) I consider myself better than other people just because I’ve had such opportunities or (b) that another person’s opinion of the text is somehow invalid because I’ve studied more. So I’m very hesitant to bring out any specific “in the Greek it says this” kind of talk, as I think it’s just distracting and unhelpful.
This blog is a different story, I guess: please bear with me as I throw some Greek words into this post and try and explain them a little.
I found verse 1 pretty distracting as I tried to figure out what was going on in the Greek…
6 Ἀδελφοί, ἐὰν καὶ προλημφθῇ ἄνθρωπος ἔν τινι παραπτώματι, ὑμεῖς οἱ πνευματικοὶ καταρτίζετε τὸν τοιοῦτον ἐν πνεύματι πραΰτητος, σκοπῶν σεαυτὸν μὴ καὶ σὺ πειρασθῇς.
Let me try and translate it for you… I’m pretty rusty at this, and I don’t usually publish my attempts at translation. Sorry for any masculine-centricity in the translation: there’s a tendency in the Greek to use male pronouns (e.g. Ἀδελφοί – brothers as in Philadelphia – the city of brotherly love, ἄνθρωπος – man as in anthropology), but that’s the way the language worked: a reflection of the culture of its day.
Brothers (or sisters), if [also] a man/person happens to be caught in any sin/transgression, you (plural) the spiritual ones – restore such a person (the this one) with a humble spirit, while watching out yourself also, [that] you are not tempted.
The word that threw me was προλημφθῇ – the fourth one in the verse. It’s a “subjunctive 3rd person passive”, so it’s a conditional kind of verb. It’s made up of the preposition προ – in front of, and the (first week of Greek study vocal word) λαμβάνω – I take hold of. The English version I had in front of me said “caught in any transgression”, but I hadn’t seen that particular word for “grab hold of” before.
So it’s the kind of sin that you keep coming back to, whether you particularly want to or not. When someone is stuck in a situation like that, the Christians around them are meant to restore them gently, being careful not to be tempted by the same sin.
That whole verse reminds me of many conversations I’ve had with people who have moved on from being involved in a church: when they had some kind of struggle, instead of being restored gently, they felt like they’d been asked to leave, and never darken the door of a church again.
It’s a sad situation, and tough to remedy: once you associate Christianity with self-righteous people who are keen to judge anyone around them, it’s a tough association to break.
Ultimately, it was these few verses that jumped out at me.
7 Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. 8 For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. 9 And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. (Galatians 6:7-9, ESV)
We talked about the good things and the bad things that we’re doing, and how – on a long enough timeframe – these things that we put energy into, good or bad, will become more and more a part of our character.
At some level, this sounded like karma, but at a more personal level. It was a challenge for me to look at how little time I’m spending actually reading the bible (as opposed to reading about it, or about church history), and to push aside some of the playing-iPhone-games-while-listening-to-podcast time to make space for it again.