Jim Barraud

It’s well known that I’m a bit of a coffee fanatic. Ask anyone who was walked past me in the street. Passing any kind of fine coffee establishment requires stopping for a cup. Which really isn’t a bad thing. There’s worse vices in the world. But the caffeine that comes with the experience is beginning to take a toll. Sleeplessness, irritability, etc… Sure, there’s decaf. I’ve gone that route and it’s kind of pointless since it really doesn’t taste the same. Because that’s why I like coffee, for the taste, not the caffeine.

So it’s time for a change. I’m going to attempt to replace my coffee addiction with green tea. Or if not entirely replace it, supplement it. Green tea has half the caffeine of coffee. And even less if you go the loose tea route and do multiple infusions. Since most of the caffeine comes out in the first infusion. It also has a tremendous amount of health benefits, which when you start to get older, you start to pay attention to.

None of this is really new though. I’ve been drinking green tea for years and have quit coffee previously. I have no illusions about my inability to quit drinking something I love, but if I can reverse the roles of coffee and tea in my life, it would be a good thing.

So I’ve begun by ordering the Green Tea Starter Set from Adagio. We’ll see how this goes.

From the sleet and freezing rain pelting the windows of my living room right now, you wouldn’t have known it was 70 degrees and sunny two days ago here in the northeast. Thoughts of laying down fertilizer and mulching flower beds quickly vanished while driving home at a top speed of 30 mph down the Garden State Cash Cow.

This post brought to via the blogging bundle in Textmate. And yes, the entire purpose of this post was to test this fine feature out. Seems to work just peachy.

Over the past couple months I’ve made some hardware upgrades of note. A bit of technological sprucing up if you will.

I’ve personally upgraded from a Powerbook G4 1.25GHz to a Macbook Pro 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo courtesy of my fine employer. It’s the perfect machine when it comes to web development. With the ability to run Mac OSX, and 2 instances of Windows XP (one for IE6 and the other for IE7) simultaneously on the same machine, productivity has definitely increased. I’ve recently installed an instance of Ubuntu, for no other reason than that I can and too see what the kids have been talking about.

The wife has just upgraded her iBook G3 800MHz to a Macbook 2GHz Core 2 Duo (white). She’s very happy with the new computer and is enamored with the two finger scrolling. It’s the little things ya know. And now that we both have iSights, we’ll be able to do some video chatting while I’m at the office or away on business. Well, that is once Apple fixes this bug that’s preventing it from working over anything except a local network. This purchase was funded with sale of my PowerMac G4 Dual 1.25GHz and the pending sale of my Powerbook G4 1.25GHz.

Speaking of selling things off, once I receive my new Airport Extreme, I’ll be selling off my old Airport Extreme. Sure the new one is faster and has more range, but it was the ability to setup network shares via external USB hard drives that was the clincher. Perfect for sharing files with the wife and setting up some automated backup solutions (come on time machine!).

And while I’m at it, I might as well mention my new Nintendo DS lite (onyx). I got this little badboy from my colleagues at the hive as a 30th Birthday present some months ago. It’s been glued to my side since.

And then there’s the upgrade to this site. I’ve gone with a simpler design and layout, and the usual promise to update it regularly.