Category: Coffee

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Coffee musings….. Dunkin Donuts Vs Honey Dew Donuts.

I just realized something… it’s fucked up alright…. Yes , there has not been a coffee post in ages…

For the coffeecommander to make such an error .. this has to be fixed for the one that drinks more coffee than the combined amount of water in the great lakes..

Now for my situation has changed and I’ve had to take some concessions… While I do have access to Honey Dew Donuts at times due to the harsh winter I’ve had to goto Dunkin Donuts …. A lot.. The problem is most cities and towns will bitch when residents do not shovel their walk, Yet when a business does not do it they seem to get a blind eye.  With the choice of walk to dunkin while getting killed because you have to walk in the road versus walking triple the distance in the road and getting killed because its a major artery through the city, I chose the lesser of two chances of death .  But, With that I take an even greater risk with my coffee. I usually order the same coffee year around, and being there so much you’d think one of the donut droids would get my coffee after a time? FUCK NO… they say its easy to order a coffee from Fuckin Gonuts.

dunkindonuts

This picture I’ve posted makes it look easy… but, You have a better chance of beating Arnold Schwarzenegger at one liners. At first I’d order my coffee like I used to when I had a Honey Dew down the street. Large iced coffee , Large , Milk with sugar on the dark side..

740d97f4362ea6c23f5feadb401a043b0f353bd11a82a453a2c8e6173a09f83cI’ve always ordered my coffee on the dark side because it keeps them from making the same screwed up mistake you’d think they would learn after the nine billionth time, If you try to match consistency with cream with milk, that’s not coffee you’re getting.   You’re getting a milk flavored with coffee at that point. I’ve tried everything with drunkin donuts to get my coffees right and its just a miracle when they did until I noticed something. When they ring your order up to make it they go through a very convoluted route to do so with the register. I don’t know if they track coffee metrics if there is such a thing, but they do take your order through the register with stunning accuracy. but, that’s where the accuracy ends.

ReceiptHalfIf you look at this example receipt, Its very telling to an anal level. One hot coffee medium 1 skim milk 2 equal.  Again… why the hell that’s on the receipt is beyond me .  I really don’t think its for customer gratification.. I can’t see someone opening a coffee and slamming the receipt down yelling about how there was only supposed to be 2 equal in there but he can taste 5.  As soon as your order completes the next steps as far as a dunkin droid making your coffee is near black magic as far as I can figure.  But using terms like “regular milk”, “Extra sugar” and dark gets you a fucking science project every time where you can only guess the contents.  There are very few dunkin donuts I trust to order a coffee with little input as possible, very rarely I’ll say at dunkin donuts “large iced coffee, milk, with sugar.” Getting back to the register though.. If you order your coffee and with somewhat fair amount of consistency, and you are a regular at a particular dunkin donuts. Watch the register, if you see what the person puts in on the amount of Milk or cream (pick your poison) and sugar. By watching that you can go back to that dunkin donuts and with some amount of accuracy you can get a repeat performance on coffee service.  Asking for regular milk on the numbers they input into their registers I’ve seen everything from 3 to 7 on that. funnier is the machines they use are funny as hell because calibration is different from week to week and even day to day at times, You’d think with a machine to help along the process to make your coffee they would be pretty static on how much milk is in your coffee.  Not even close..  Asking for 1 milk one day will sometimes get you this much

il_570xN.511421575_tead about a thimbles worth..

or

MILK TRUCK FLORIDA TANKER, Drink Florida Fresh Milk Tanker Truck,Dairy Farm Cow Raw Milk PickupThis monster fuckload of milk

Sugar of course has the same issues at dunkin. I cut down on sugar completely after having coffee with more than an inch of sugar in the bottom.  So again at dunkin donuts I have mitigated how much sugar by going by numbers. its not fool proof but it works.

diabeetusSaying extra sugar at dunkin donuts appeases the Brimely Overlord.

It all feels like a damn science to order a damn coffee from Dunkin Donuts, At honey dew  I’ve never had that issue and even if they do screw up usually its a one timer if you turn up again.

The final point on dunkin donuts and honey dews coffee is the most confusing one. they both order from the same distributor for their grinds… yet, the coffees are so astronomically different its confounding. If you let your ice melt in a dunkin donuts coffee the flavor is just … water coffee… there’s no way around it the coffee is done.  If you do the same with honey dew, even after the ice as melted you still get a pretty good tasting -ice coffee.

So, at this point i cant wait for warmer weather and a bit of a longer walk for better coffee , I’d just rather have good taste than need a mathematics and science degree to order a fucking coffee.

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What the hell part II?

I’ve been trying to keep up a more updated pace to the website. But nothing like it used to be. While my days still start and end with coffee. Everything in between is still a bit chaotic.   It seems wishful thinking on my part for one peaceful fucking day. With what pieces of my life I have left, they are essentially the most important to me.  While being able to keep minor things , I’ve had to think about things and move forward with stuff finding a way to define myself.

Being more or less kicked to the street is a hurtful thing… been there. seen it. done it.. fuck it… While its been over two months since this has happened. the wound is still fresh and still getting torn into on occasion.  I just wish to be left alone by the person that is causing all my issues in life.  That person seems to have a psychosis to thinking I am still a part of there life and somehow still doing things.  I just want to be left alone.

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Dunkin Gonuts advertising gone wild.

Apparently dunkin donuts is trying smell based ads , I guess we can be thankful that its not taco bell .. Though i could imagine that ad as cheech marin and Tommy Chong shitting their brains out and going “duuuude yo quiero taco bell”.  I’m just not sure on this one but, since it’s based in another country perhaps they have a better smell than most dunkin donuts i’ve gone to around here. I’ve come to a bit of a truce with dunkin donuts and they have seemed to have learned there lesson from serving boiled cat vomit.  Since a few year back when bluesteel and I were getting consistent bad coffee(read: bad milk, watercoffee etc) we swore off dunkin for quite the few years.

Its just weird to try to use advertising by smell, and the jingle don’t they do enough already? They would likely tattoo the back of eyeballs and forehead if they thought it would sell more coffee with the logic of getting more impressions.  Seriously instead of coming up with random shit like this , improve the coffee and the people will come, otherwise you will just piss people off on there way to work with this and they will just wait till they can get to the coffee at work.

Rather than put your ads everywhere and go into visual overload or just plain lying,  improve the product. In burger king the other they removed the wall painting to add vinyl pictures of people having a meal on the wall and the first thing I thought about them is “what the fuck fast food joint has this kind of service” since the pictures on the wall were a large salad in a metal mesh bowl, people with smiles drinking out of glasses, and burgers that had no bearing on burgerking it self, it was more to remind you, If you spent this money at a real restaurant this is what you could of had for $8.

Maybe in europe they have that kind of service, but not here. As i’ve said – Improve your service and product, and not try to play the follow the leader or someone on acid thought of a really cool idea for advertising stoned off there ass. Divert 10% of your ad budget to the people and the products and you will create a better impression than trying to give the image of a good impression on TV that you know was thought up while people laughed and say  we don’t do this shit.

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Call of deluded Elite premium ? wtf.

With the advent of DLC’s game publishers are getting more and more ridiculous with content and how its presented to its user base.  I hate microtransactions with games and they are becoming mainstream to the point they are worthless to what they add to the game and making the games themselves worthless.

As publishers tap this as a primary income source games loose alot of there content because the game release often is hobbled to the point of being a few hours long and content running out in the first 5 hours.  Often now you see unfinished games released with Day 1 DLC’s that fill in holes in the game that were made by short cutting the game and putting these pieces of a game behind a pay wall.

My friend picked up call of duty MW3 and i noticed that right on the box they were pushing for picking up something called Call of Duty elite premium  and I wondered. What is it? its basically a $50 dollar limited license to the future content and a bunch of crap that was either free or was in games in the past.

Looking quickly over what you get with this “service”

3. Analyze & Improve Your Performance

Access Guides to Maps, Weapons, Killstreaks, Perks, and Equipment

Most games before COD ussaully have some sort of stats tracking , Hell Unreal tournament had this kind of stat tracking back in December 1999 . That 11 years before COD, Sure this is still on the free end of the elite but, what the hell, I know they are going to say but this costs money to track on a server etc etc etc. Not really since it takes all of ten miliseconds and a few lines of code to say l33tk4lla killed soandso.

4. Customize your load outs & sync DIRECTLY to the game

WHY? if you at work trying to think about how to kill someone in a game and you’re bored shitless likely its not going to work.

onwards to ..

7. THEATER

Free Premium

  • Upload & Share 30 Second HD Videos Online
There’s this thing.. I forget what its called. Yewtub yooboob. younoob? OH YOUTUBE, yeah thats it.
Needless function.
Than you hit the paywall

10. MW3 DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT*, INCLUDING ALL THE MW3 MAPS

Premium

  • More Content than Ever, with 20 Pieces of New MW3 DLC Premium
  • New monthly DLC released over 9 months, so you Always have Something New to Play Premium
  • More Variety than Ever, with New MP Maps, Spec Ops, Missions, Game Modes & More Premium
  • You get to keep all the DLC even if your membership expires. Premium

This is what is annoying. Likely all this material was fleshed out waaaay before the release of the game so they will keep dropping it on players to keep the “interest of players” up, there’s a tell tale sign that this content is either done or was near done when Call of Duty was released.

Read it carefully ….. 20 pieces of …. New monthly DLC over 9 months… new game  modes.  basically they announced they have this DONE and set to be dripped out to the user base as slow as possible to keep interest in the game rather than have a finished product.  Since the announcement is in finite numbers rather than speculative, which means they either cut this from the game or made a decision to leave this from the game.

DLC type content is an excuse to release a half finished game and get 3x the money for it. If you look at the cost of MW3 its pretty much over a 100$ for a complete game since the shelf life for these games are limited to about 12 months at most.

In the past games were given free content to keep interest or letting people mod the games to their hearts content . Now if you mod a game to have more fun its pretty much going to get you banned from the game. These games now come with FREE planned obsolescence .

What happened with games we could play to our hearts content and Not worry if EA or someone will shut down an aspect of the game or software that therefor makes the product unusable , They Should be forced to put some sort of patch into games that have to connect to servers that multiplayer still works on a connection without the need for servers in the middle. Direct connect games used to be common but they are hard to find these days without some sort of hoops to jump through.

Basically if this gets ground… game will continue down this bad path and players will suffer at the hands of the producers of this crap.

My guess is when COD 10 is release and you want to play COD MW3 for old time sake you will try to play and get “CONNECTION REFUSED” and be stuck with the Disc that now serves as your coffee cup coaster.

 

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The Price of Coffee and You.

In the last couple of years you may have noticed that a cup of coffee is not exactly cheap anymore. What used to be under $2.00$ is now over $2.50 or higher.

This is a many part problem, on the one hand you have weather and whatnot but that does not affect the longterm supplies as there is always next year and so on. On the other hand you have the stock market which is now played like the worlds largest and most expensive slot machine. In the end Both hands play together and effect you.

When a crop of coffee is destroyed and mass media picks it up they generally don’t play the news in a way that is helpful to the average person . instead they go on a just about myspace approach and say “OMG COFFEE GOT BLOWN UP ZOMG THERES NO MORE COFFEE OMG PRICES RISE!!!”  well the problem with that is its one crop in some place in the world. But, if you take the news at stock you’d be going “shit… thats going to hurt.”  Coffee is grown world wide. From the National coffee association of USA Coffee is grown in about 50 countries . In the last year coffee commodities  has have rose about 70% due to speculators looking for a pay-off with any commodity.  The problem with that is speculators tend to  buy up the coffee at unheard of rates than force the price up , the problem is that people that don’t even sell coffee have the ability to buy up coffee in the stock market, I could see if they had a limit cap on this but they don’t many other foods fall into this trap where they get bought up and sold and resold to the point of insanity.

Soon the only way to get a good cup of coffee is bleeding your self to death at a blood donation center, Giving blood is not a half bad idea but.. the price of coffee should not require you to give a damn kidney.

I’ve never liked the idea of speculators, because of the control they can assert over a market. Commodities should have some limit cap to outside buyers that have no reason to purchase coffee. to lock speculators out would be a bad thing but, limiting the damage they can do in the whole scale of things.

the reason i say limits is it makes the market much harder to game and force the prices way the fuck up .

Even dunkin donuts knows a bad thing when they see it

“Something as simple as a good cup of coffee at a fair price is under threat today because of intense pressure by hedge funds and other speculators,” said Ed O’Rourke, chief procurement officer for Dunkin’ Donuts National DCP LLC, a franchise-owned cooperative that handles purchasing and distribution to more than 6,000 Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin Robbins outletsnationwide, in a Dec. 14 letter to the CFTC.

Honestly,  it seems like the stock markets are based in fantasy as far as the “Recovery”, and speculators are NOT helping things .

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Time: Top 10 most dangerous foods. ORLY?

Every now and than I find an article that just makes me go WTF. It starts off .

Top 10 Most Dangerous Foods

The American Academy of Pediatrics released a policy statement on Feb. 22, recommending the labeling and possible redesign of hot dogs to prevent choking deaths among children. Here’s a look at 10 risky foods

So it basically starts off as “Since hot dogs killed some amount of people, Here are foods that we think are dangerous and cause controversy. but the list gets rather silly. Here’s tonight’s top ten list…. (seriously with the foods they include David letterman should announce this one. Bold Stuff is Comments by me.)

Eat at Your Own Risk

1. Hot Dogs:  Common sense issue. CHEW YOUR FOOD!
2. Fugu: blowfish? are you kidding me. how many times in your life do you eat this one?
3. Ackee: Random Food that You’ve likely never eaten
4. Peanut Panic: This shit answers itself. Notice its Peanut Panic and not nut allergies.
5. Leafy Greens: does not belong on list- wash your damn food first , I know this doesn’t work for restaurants. Unless of course its killer tomatoes.. than run
6. Not Exactly Sweet as Pie: Rhubarb… And this one gets the stupid award. Eating  the leaves can lead to poison but the article misstates a certain issue. You’d Have to ingest 11pounds of it in order to die.
7. Tuna Tremors : You can stop sucking on broken thermometers and start eating tuna!
8. Cassava: This one I’m leaving alone.

9. Coffee: Coffee…… Really? Just wait for it.. Lets pour on the stupid, From the article “. In 1992, McDonald’s had some trouble when 79-year-old grandmother Stella Liebeck of New Mexico sued the fast-food company because a scalding cup of 170° coffee caused third-degree burns over 6% of her body, including her thighs, buttocks and groin. Liebeck was awarded $2.86 million (the amount was later reduced in a settlement).”
10. Mushrooms: No no lets go back to 9 , everything else on this list is either, use common sense, or stupidity.

The Fact they even put coffee on the list and the reasoning is beyond me.  But, what they point out coffee for being dangerous is ridiculous.   Say! Lets open this scalding hot coffee between my legs! Yes. that’s the idea you want to bring to your readers.  I know… this was before the time of the whole cup warning thing.

Every coffee cup sold these days has that warning, Call it common sense but, apparently some people don’t have it.  Who knew that hot coffee was hot? Shit whats next Water is wet? I know I’m being a bit angry with this one and yes someone did get severely injured.  But to put a warning out on coffee being one of the most “Dangerous” foods.  Also “Leafy Greens” What is the times trying to do make everyone so neurotic over food that they end up in a Psych ward? They go out of the way to explain how ZOMG bad these things are but do no explain what good these things do.

In this article there is an AMAZING amount of disregard for any sort of good practice in writing. Half-asses sources half truths and willingly causing fright. Also most of the issues are from the retail side of things as in bad preparation, questionable practices and such. Not many people are going to be going “Honey LETS CUT SOME BLOWFISH TONIGHT WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!”

As Far as the times. They wonder why print is going out of style like the dinosaurs.

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Coffee grinder recall , may cause coffee to taste different due to ..

Laceration hazard… OW…

Starbucks has received three reports of hand lacerations when the product — sold as  and Seattle’s Best Coffee Blade Grinder — turned on unexpectedly during cleaning. The company has received 176 reports altogether of the grinder failing to turn off or turning on unexpectedly.

I dont know about you but when cleaning anything with blades, batteries or a plug, generally the idea is Unplug first than clean. from the article it sounds like a poor power switch was used and triggers easily .