Control your personal identity on the web

As the Internet evolves to contain more of our lives I am strongly recommending people start to control their personal identity on the web. Who are you on the web? What is your location on the Internet? Is your email who you really are or is it your linked in page? Is Facebook the true verifier of your identity or is it Twitter?

#1: Domain
If you have a name like mine jonathonsciola.com is a great place to nest. Buy a domain and use it for your personal identity. Link to all your other accounts and people will know who you are and where to find you.

#2: Portal
Portals like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter allow you to found your personal identity on their platform.

#3: Identity sites
About.me/jonathonsciola serves as an identity director for me.

#4: Email
There is still hope for email. Make sure you have a tight password and change it regularly. Build in contingency accounts. However if you change jobs, or for whatever reason hotmail starts to charge and you dont want to pay you have all your eggs in one basket. Again, email comes in at #3 because you own the domain.

Whatever your choice, the information age dictates that we the individual must choose to control our data and our identity. Make sure you backup your data, determine where your online residency will be otherwise someone else will.

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/04/30/facebooks-identity-opportunity-or-somebodys/

Sivers me timbers!

Derek Siver is an entrepreneur who writes a summary of every book he reads and he reads them all. When education can impact what you need to get ahead a summary like this is powerful! I remember at Uni reading the summary of chapters and “getting it”. This website will help you to glean priceless information from the best books:

http://sivers.org/book

I hope you enjoy!

Books like Seth Godins Tribes, and Roberts Rich Dad poor dad… This is one of the most content-rich websites on the Internet.

Coffee quality

Having spent 7 hours in a stopover in Kula Lumpur and having spent 7 days in Asia I have enjoyed spending time contemplating what exactly it is I “love” about coffee and have realized I love coffee quality.

Here is a post on what constitutes a high quality espresso coffee.

Preparation Method

An important introductory note is that everyone’s personal taste is valid, however there are principles that should not be crossed. A preface always is that coffee is personal. Some like it Turkish. Some like it iced. I like espresso. Coffee quality is mutually exclusive from coffee preparation.

Farm or Origin

To control and improve the quality of a cup of espresso coffee one must control and improve the production, processing and transportation of the green coffee bean. One must select the right variety of coffee, plant it in the right location, pick cherries at the appropriate ripeness and dry or wash the coffee effectively. Any misuse of these processes will diminish the coffee quality in the cup.

Roasting

Once you have selected an arabica single origin from South America or Africa (my preference) you can trust an experienced roaster to use a barrel roaster and create a profile you enjoy. This is usually 12-15 minutes at around 250 degrees. Roasted beans must be Consimed within 30-40 days.

Grinding

One needs to grind their beans for each cup. Choose a conical burr grinder. Choose a setting that is right for your beans. Each type of bean will grind differently.

Espresso preparation

Use a quality E61 group if available or preheat boiler to 90 degrees for extraction. Try to flush the shower screen before use. Regularly clean your machine. Allow the group to preheat for home machines. Back flush your groups every hour. Receive barista training approved by me.

Milk preparation

This really has to be shown. However preheat boiler to 120 degrees. Never use a used jug or used milk. Start with a fresh cold jug and fresh cold milk. Texture. Do not add too much air. Stop at 55-70 degrees. Pour slowly generally.

Final preparation

Always drink coffee. I am surprise how many baristas do not drink coffee. This is likened to a priest who never attends church. Tate your coffee. Is it bitter? Is it too hot? How does it compare to an established barista champions coffee? As a coffee trainer I never teach how to make coffee, I teach them how to understand coffee. Ongoing training and exposure to farm, processing, roasting and preparation methods is a must.

What is this Christian thing anyway?

A lot of people have wondered what Christianity is all about. Why are there a billion registered Catholics, and a further billion “pentecostal” Christians in the world.

This passage says it all: Romans eight verse three, ”For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh…”. Let me explain:

Moses brought the ten commandments. That’s “the law“. Imagine the law as a ladder that never reached the top of the mountain. If you don’t break any you reach the top. However it is impossible to reach the top. “The law was powerless” shows that the ladder was not high enough. It was weakened by “the flesh”. I want to do wrong. I can’t do right.

What “God did by sending His son…” is He fulfilled the remaining distance for you, out of love. (“For God so loved the world that He gave His only son“). That remaining distance was made up by Christ: His death was punishment enough for all mankind.

People who have accepted Christs sacrifice receive His perfect law-fulfilling life in exchange for their sin-filled law breaking life. God prepared for this from the beginning.

All you have to do is believe, “Whoever believes on Him shall not perish but have everlasting life”

For the Christian now, then, there is another ladder; a ladder that reaches from earth to heaven in our daily lives. Heaven is open and we are able to bring that to earth…

www.stairway.org.au/melbournenorth

How to create a FREE iPhone ringtone using your own iTunes music

iPhones are great but they have crappy ringtones…

It’s so easy – and yet so difficult:

1. Find the song you like, right-click and choose “Get Info”
2. In the “options” tab change the start and end time to the part of the song you like making it no more than 40 seconds
3. Right-click the song (it will appear to be the same) and choose, “Make ACC version”. If you see “make-mp3″ version you can change this in options/preferences and “Import Settings”
4. When your new ACC file is created right-click and choose, “Open in windows explorer/show in finder”
5. Change the file type from M4a to M4r (Windows users need to change view options to “Show file extensions” from “Hide file extensions”
6. Drag your new .M4r file to iTunes (in the Ringtone section)
7. Sync your beats!

Is Facebook trying too hard?

Gina Trapani - Smarterware

I read a Twitter post by @smarterware quoting Joe Moon’s article on Facebook’s New Timeline Feature (here http://bit.ly/r5Reru) who draws an analogy/parallel between Facebook and the wedding photographer. Both add value to the “events” of our lives however, as Jo points out, there becomes a point where the “event” begins to change and be adjusted by the wedding photographer who is permitter more and more authority to change the wedding. “Stand over here”. “Let’s wait a few minutes until the sun comes out” and so on. All the time the wedding photographer has the brides best interest at heart – we hope – and all the more the wedding photographer is making our important day according to their schedule and their values. Is Facebook doing the same as the wedding photographer? Is Facebook trying too hard?

@JeffJarvis has insight into these kinds of things and has led me to create a theory: that people, groups of people that is, do not inherently want to be organised. They want to self-organise. I believe that Facebook is beginning to do what governments do, and people resist; they organise us. There is a point where Facebook and the wedding planner begin to ruin the wedding. There is a place where governments start to ruin the country they are governing. We only have to look at the economy at the moment to see that.

Jeff often asks the question (such as in his book, “What Would Google Do?”) “What business are you in?” Is Google in the search business or the advertising business. Is Yahoo an Internet company or an Entertainment company. Jeff would say, for example, that the G is in the advertising business. Facebook, according to yours truly, is in the advertising business too, however my observation is that Facebook eloquently organises our social lives for us and for that we give them our eyeballs, our time and our information. Google on the other hand gives eloquence to information predominately, not society. Not yet anyway. Google organises our websites, our emails, our calendar. Facebook organises our friends.

That is why I see Google having a much harder time at launching a social network. They’re DNA is to eloquently organise data and to add value to that data. Facebook eloquently organises our social lives and adds value to that. The wedding planner eloquently organises our memories and adds value to that. Being a search engine Google is not built to create social networks, hence the complete, embarrassing failure of Wave, and Buzz, to name a few.

We – the people – want Facebook to give eloquence to our social lives. To our data – but not to organise us. In the same way that we do not want Google to have too much information – too much power – we don’t want Facebook to have too much power over our social lives. When Facebook starts to divide and create borders around not only our data but our friendships, our groups, they have crossed the line. They are trying too hard. They have become a government.

Now this is not a post about predicting an exodus from Facebook. Far from it. There are too many barriers to exit. (See Porters 5 Forces). This is an observation that the business Facebook is in is organising people. Jeff Jarvis once wrote that Google “eloquently organises information” making it useable and valuable in a way that advertisers are happy to pay for.

As the people of the world give freely and willing information that governments drool over they need to take the warning that we – the people – do not want to be organised.

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/04/06/bill-of-rights-in-cyberspace-amended/

Links: www.buzzmachine.com, www.twit.tv, www.thinkupapp.com

Packaging options – did you know…

Today I had my first illy coffee. It was a shot; an espresso. It tasted okay. The caffeine was interesting. It had a clarity and purity that I had not experienced before however the flavour had a lot to make up for. Perhaps it’s their sourcing methods or their packaging methods that brought that clarity and freshness. It’s probably packaging…

Illy is an icon in Italy; known for being “the best coffee in the world” and there’s good reason behind that belief. Illy reject individual beans that are defective using three waves of light: they shine green, red and near infrared light onto each individual bean and reject those that reflect light outside of a set spectrum they scienticifcally decided was good for healthy beans. Illy recently changed their company focus from the best bean to the best cup and since then have focused on packaging, preparation and what they call polysensory aspects of coffee.

Packaging:
According to Andrea Illy who spoke at the New York Science Academy in 2008 on the Science of Coffee, Illy packages their roasted coffee inside cans containing only Nitrogen which prevents not only oxidation however also pauses the release of carbon dioxide which is a great cause of the degradation of roasted coffee. Under 1.5 atmospheric pressure Illy coffee is preserved indefinitely and is able to be consumed as fresh as possible by the consumer. (Other packaging options:
Valve-release – another common packing is within a paper or multi-layered bag (usually containing some aluminium layers) with a valve to release gas. According to Illy this will prevent oxidation however it will not prevent the release of carbon dioxide which will leave with much of the flavour. It takes around 30 days for the full de-gassing to occur.
Vacuum-seal – unfortunately those vacuum “bricks” have already been degassed. So you may have a coffee protected from their air, however there is no carbon dioxide left in the bean meaning there is also a loss of flavour).

Preparation
There are many ways to prepare coffee. Two are percolation and infusion. Espresso is in fact a percolation not an infusion. An espresso is a solution, a coloidal suspension and an emulsion.

Polysensory Experience
The experience of the cup.

I would not say that Illy is the best coffee in the world. One reason is that Illy’s philosophy is to blend coffees. I prefer single origins. However there is no doubt that Illy coffee has a freshness and purity I have not experienced before. It may be the packaging…

To find out more about Andrea Illy visit: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Andrea-Illy/110866958964461?sk=info

Quality

Like Alice in Wonderland I’ve found myself down the rabbit hole that is coffee. A year ago I ventured into returning happily to my roots in customer service after 7 years in self employment. Don’t get me wrong I loved the freedom, the money and the celebrity of owning my own business yet the promise of not taking my work home with me was too attractive for a season. So a year ago I headed deep into the world of coffee – and what a complicated world it is!

No, there are no mad-hatters down the rabbit hole; we are all mad-hatters! When you get deep enough into the rabbit hole you’ll find baristas roasting their own beans at home at night, cafe owners video blogging the latest pour-over method, entrepreneurs starting exchange networks online, and roasters booking their personal holidays to south america in order to visit the farms.

But what’s the addiction? It’s quality. Coffee has so much to offer and yet it is often abused, wasted, neglected, misunderstood and ignored. “For lack of knowledge my people perish” said the God of the Jewish race. Similarly most people – including so called baristas, roasters and cafe owners – don’t know enough about coffee or understand it to get the most out of it.

Here are some items you may not “know” about espresso coffee:

One billion people drink coffee daily world-wide

59% of Americans drink coffee on a daily basis

80% of Europeans drink coffee daily

Espresso is stronger in look, body and flavour yet not in caffeine

One third of coffee produced in Ethiopia is consumed within Ethiopia

Arabica cultivar has 44 chromosomes whereas Robusta has only 22

Total world production of coffee 120 million bags at 60kilo’s each

Caffeine has a half-life (time it takes to leave your body) of 2 hours

Tabacco industry in the past may have funded research to disfavour coffee

A thought or two on packaging:
Did you know that coffee once roasted contains a large amount of carbon dioxide. 1 kilogram of coffee contains 12 litres of carbon dioxide. It takes 30 days (approximately) for coffee once roasted to release it’s carbon dioxide. This is called “degassing”. Did you know that once degassed many of the aromas and flavours contained in the coffee is lost. Therefore packaging coffee with a gas release valve will prevent oxidisation yet will not slow degassing thus losing many of the great flavours seven to ten days post roast!

Cottle Coffee Tea and Nuts

Today I visited Cottle Coffee www.cottlecoffee.com.au established in 1912 Cottle Coffee has been roasting coffee in Melbourne for almost 100 years. Situated in the same location at 300 coventry street South Melbourne Cottle Coffee is brewing, roasting and wholesaling beans from all over the world – Costa Rica, Australia, Indonesia and more…

They have a 80 kilogram roaster in the back and an air-roaster as well. They wholesale beans to cafes in Melbourne or direct to the public. The exciting news is that Cottle Coffee is opening next door a cafe in the next couple of weeks! Stay tuned for more information, reviews and posting on Cottle Coffee…

Adjusting the grind

I like this video in it’s simplicity. Joshua from Coffee Hit told me that adjusting the grind is actually a 3 month course. So obviously this 3 minute video is only covering the basics.