I have been learning to cup coffee and am in the process of collecting forms.  Here are a few that I have found online. From Roast Magazine Sweet Maria's Cup of Excellence form SCAA form example Two forms from CoffeeGeek.com Now I need to call my brother and setup a cupping session.

The reason I decided to visit the Cartel Coffee Lab was to get a cup of coffee made by a Clover Coffee Maker.  The clover is detailed in Wired Magazine recently and the Arizona-Coffee.com blog wrote about Cartel.  My employer has opened a new school in Chandler and a visit to the Cartel is only slightly out of my way. I stopped by the Cartel Coffee Lab about 2 pm on Friday afternoon.  The coffee shop is not easy to find.  It is not far from ASU main campus, but tucked in an "office" complex off of University Avenue.  The place was busy with students hanging out studying and other customers hanging out.  I was surprised to see that Clover is their only coffee maker other than their espresso machine. While waiting for my turn in line, I noticed the owner roasting a batch of coffee on a home roaster and struck up a conversation with him about roasting coffee.  It was a fun conversation.  He likes his coffee! When it was my turn to order, I asked for a 16 oz. coffee made by the Clover.  The barista offered me two coffee options.  The one I chose was Guatemala Huehuetenango.  It was medium bodied and had a citrus flavor.  The other option was a very mild Brazil Daterra Sweet Yellow. I like more robust coffee so I chose the Guatemalan coffee. The barista went and took a plastic up of beans off a shelf and ground them.  Once they were ground, she moved them immediately to the Clover's brewing chamber.  She explained a little of the science behind the coffee and told me about the Clover brewing process.  Being a coffee nerd, I enjoyed seeing the machine in action.  (Read the Wired article for the details of how the Clover works.)  The cup of coffee the Clover produced was very hot, as it should be.  I took a slurp immediately and was happy to have an excellent cup of coffee.  The precision and detail that the Cartel staff takes in preparing a single cup of coffee is awesome (grinding the beans and transferring to the water quickly, brewing single cups of coffee).  I really enjoyed visiting the Cartel Coffee Lab and recommend that you visit the coffee shop.  I plan to go back soon! website myspace new times article azcentral.com article Flickr photo of the Clover

Today, the St. Louis Cardinals put the Diamondbacks and their fams out of their misery by elminating the Dbacks from the 2008 playoffs.  The team has played well and kept our hopes alive, until yesterday's loss to the Cardinals.   The Dodgers have clinched the divison and we fans have three days to whine and complain before the season ends. I believe that the Dbacks need to focus on the bullpen pitching for the offseason acquistions.  General Manager, Josh Byrnes has a good eye for talent.  He needs to find a closer and a big bunch of relievers. Photo from PHXWEBGUY's Flickr account and used under the Creative Commons License. Check to PHXWEBGUY's Diamondbacks set.  Nice!

I have been hearing about Twitter for a long time, but have never taken the time to try it out. I can see many hours are going to be spent playing with this application. Follow me at http://twitter.com/whereduck

From the website: "Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide." I learned about this fun tool today from Wesley Fryer's Moving at the Speed of Creativity blog. The words below are from my Delicious tags.

I am tired and don’t want to think about writing. Here is a photo from last weeks Cardinals game.

One of the things that we enjoy about Flagstaff is the Sunday morning farmer’s market. Officially called the “Flagstaff Community Market”. There are usually many vegetable vendors, plus a smattering of other vendors. The one vendor that we really enjoy is Dr. Hummus.

FeedDemon is a RSS feed reader.  It brings your RSS feeds to your desktop.  I started using FeedDemon several year ago.  It manages all of my RSS subscriptions. Looking at the statistics from FeedDemon, I have 68 feeds in 16 folders.  The list of folders are: Blackberry, Business, Coffee, Coldfusion, Drupal, Education, Family, Favorite Feeds, Friends, Health, Religion, Software, Technology and Web Authoring. My favorite feeds: Lifehacker, Arizona Coffee, S.S. Hanson, Kassblog, Stand to Reason, and Technibble.

My normal commute to work is five minutes.  This week I have had to drive to several of our schools to install new hardware and software.  Two of these days were spent in Chandler in the east valley.  Coming home yesterday, it took me over an hour to drive from Chandler to Glendale.  The drive reminded me of one of the down falls of living and working in Phoenix – driving, especially driving across town.  It especially makes me grateful for a short day to day commute to work!