arghyle

Starbucks just renovated their SoHo location on Spring at Crosby. This is basically their NYC flagship location, or at least their lower Manhattan flagship, so it’s a bit of a big deal given Starbucks’ desire (need?) to innovate. More importantly it’s the first and only NYC location to have a Clover machine. Starbucks bought Clover just about two years ago and has already rolled out the machines in Seattle, Boston, Miami, and San Francisco.

Caveat- I’m not a huge Starbucks fan. I don’t have any problems with the franchise, it’s just that there are a lot of great places to get coffee in NYC and I tend to opt for the variety of neighborhood locations over the consistency offered by Starbucks. I’ve had Clover coffees before, at Gimme, Grumpy, and others. I still regularly have it at Kaffe 1668, who is one of the few locations to still use them.

The Store

The newly renovated Starbucks location looks great. The old one was your typical Starbucks–nice enough but with serious signs of wear from constant high traffic. The new setup is nicer than the old one ever was–there is a lot of reclaimed-looking rough-hewn hardwoods, iron furniture, leather stools, and even the stands (that hold stuff you can buy) look nice. There is a lot of seating–both tables and stools–and a much more efficient use of space. This store doesn’t have the overstuffed (read: gross) furniture found in other stores.

The bar is much better than in other locations. It’s lower so you can see what is going on with your drink and the signage and layout are both improved. Everything looks much friendly, less corporate. We’ll see how it handles traffic though, I was there are about 8:15a Saturday morning (not exactly prime time).

The employees were insanely nice. I think these might have been a corporate training staff (or at least one of them was) because the person that rang me up was very excited that I ordered a Clover. She also knew the other Clover locations right off the top of her head. She was fast, friendly, and professional, leaving no doubt that she really wanted me to enjoy my $3.40 cup of coffee. The person that made my coffee seemed to operate the Clover well enough, still with some hesitancy, but with a good understanding of the process.

The Coffee

I think Starbucks’ Clover-brewed is a pretty good cup of coffee. I got the Kona, which I don’t drink much of, but I did enjoy it. After ordering I walked over to the Clover area and watched the barista weigh and then grind my coffee. He then started brewing it in the Clover, talking to me about the process. Maybe he wasn’t as knowledge about it as someone at Cafe Kaffe 1668 but he clearly had been trained on operating the Clover well enough to make a coffee with very little wasted time.

I’d say that Starbucks was able to have the coffee taste somewhat like a what we expect from the franchise but it’s definitely a Clover. It had lots of flavor and great clarity. There were hints of sweetness and less bitterness than typical Starbucks. As is typical with the Clover you get that clarity but you lose body as well as some of the grit and oils of a french press. I’m not sure if Starbucks will be able to dial in their Clovers as often as a small coffee shop, but this one seemed right where they wanted it to be–delivering Starbucks tasting coffee while giving customers something different than Starbucks’ normal drip offerings.

The Spring and Crosby location is definitely the nicest Starbucks I’ve ever been to. I can’t say that I’ll be going to it often (not with Balthazar right there, as well as Gimme and newcomer Village Tart nearby) but I’d take it over any other Starbucks location in the city and I’ll keep it in mind for when, if ever, I’m dying for a cup of Clover-brewed.

I really like FreshDirect. It, as you probably know, is a grocery delivery service in NYC. They have a nice web site, a huge selection, and very good food. I find that shopping through them saves me some money and, more importantly, a lot of time.

For the most part the service is incredibly good at getting you want you ordered. Considering that a $100 grocery order could easily have over 30 items from a number of different departments, it’s impressive that FreshDirect is as accurate as they are. In fact in my last 20 (or so) orders I can only recall two problems. Both of these were a single missing item. FD makes it very easy to go to their site and report the problem. On each occasion I got a response in well under and hour and was credited for the item that same day. The customer service, in my experience, is fantastic.

Last week my order was missing a pomegranate. I ordered three and received two. Disappointing, but the site was running a two-for-$5 deal so I would expect that the vast majority of people were ordering two and my request for a third was easy to overlook. Anyway I reported the issue and it was resolved in hours. Or was it?

I got back my purchase price of $2.50, seemingly fair compensation as that is what I paid for the piece of fruit. But upon further reflection, I’m not so sure. Here is a run-down of a reimbursement model that is more comprehensive than FreshDirect’s 1:1 system. It assumes that I needed that item and now have to get one locally.

• Item in question: $2.50
• Difference in price from at a local grocer: $0.50
• Transportation to and from local grocer, including shopping/checkout time: $3.00
• Time spend emailing Fresh Direct, looking through empty boxes again, etc.: $0.25
• Pain and suffering: n/a
• Total: $6.25

So while I very much appreciate FreshDirect’s commitment to customer service and the shipment of accurate orders, I think there are different ways to look at their reimbursement system. What on the surface seems very fair gets complicated upon further inspection. That missing pomegranate doesn’t just leave me without a piece of fruit. And that $2.50 completely fails to take into account the underlying value of FreshDirect’s deliver system and their above-average quality produce. In fact it could be said that FreshDirect is implicitly putting themselves at the same level as any Manhattan grocery–that is to say at the sorry state of a D’Agostino’s or Food Emporium.

But is $6.25 a fair price for them to pay me for a pomegranate? After all, most people wouldn’t consider buying one, even this king of fruit, at anything near that price. It might seem like it harshly penalizes FD for an innocent, infrequent, and inevitable error. That may not be completely untrue, but the fact remains that I have to spend a significant amount of time to right the situation and that $3.00 figure is a very conservative time given how much I value my time after work. Even if I was going to my local grocery for another reason (and why would I after ordering from Fresh Direct?) I would still have to bare the burden of the price discrepancy between Fresh Direct and Whole Foods (another purveyor of POM brand pomegranates). The other sums (time spent emailing and searching through boxes) might seem trifling, but the point is that a missing pomegranate is more than just a piece of fruit.

Let’s get this out of the way–I work on the internet and I consider myself a power user. I make no claims as to the efficiency of my methods, they are just what works for me.

A problem that has been plaguing me for some time now is running Firefox with multiple tabs open. Given my workload and the number of ideas floating around in my head this may range anywhere from 20-90 tabs… it’s not something I’m proud of but it’s just how things turn out. To me tabs are a staging area for work, a To Do list, a To Read list, and an account of what I’m interested in on a given day. I don’t really like bookmarks–I’ve basically given up on Del.icio.us and while I do still drag bookmarks to my desktop they tend to accumulate into a huge mess, finding their way into folders which are dropped in other folders as the pile grows.

This shouldn’t be a problem since I am good about taking the time to manage and cull my tabs. It’s just that when I get to busy to address some of them the number of open ones opens. So if I don’t have the time to do some reading then the stack grows. My problem happens when Firefox crashes, something that has been occurring more and more lately.

I used to think it was my old computer, but about a year ago I upgraded to a quad-core system with 4GB of RAM. It runs Windows Vista, but is otherwise a very capable machine. Quad-core, 4GB, 10K RPM hard drive, P45 chipset… should be able to handle a few webpages right? Not exactly.

For me crashes happen every day, multiple times a day, but only in Firefox (3.5.3), my main browser. I also run Google Chrome, which practically never crashes and is also open all the time (though rarely with more than 8 tabs). The problem with crashing with 80 tabs open, aside from the frustration, is that it takes at least 5 minutes to get everything loaded again, sometimes more, during which all my system’s network bandwidth is being consumed by the browser. Sessions are logged out and occasionally work is lost.

The question I have is why? It’s not the computer, even if Firefox is eating up 25% of the processor and 1GB of RAM, it’s not that bad. It could be my OS, it could be Firefox. Or maybe a combination of the two. It’s very hard to say.

I have examined my browser extensions, which can be a major source of instability. The active ones include: FireFTP, MenuEditor, Session Manager, and Tabs Mix Plus, all of which are up-to-date. I’ve removed a few that I found to impact stability (including Google Gears), but the crashes have continued. And they are rarely violent, surprising crashes, instead Firefox just seems to slow down, blip in and out, and then die. I get the crash manager, and then I can restore my session, and in a few minutes I’m back.

So far I have just figured that Firefox is the issue. The browser has had memory leakage issues in the past and it seems like they continue in one form or another. Running all those pages, include most of which has some sort of Flash and rich media on them, just takes a toll, the performance degrades, and a restart is needed, just like with a Windows computer after a week or two. This isn’t exactly scientific but it seems to sums things up.

I need to investigate running my workload on Ubuntu and OS X, so I can see if the OS is the issue. If not, then I’ll know it’s Firefox. Or maybe today’s computer just can’t run 80 tabs at once consistently and I need to wait for some sort of future technology, a neural net processor or something like that.

Got any fixes or ideas? Post them below.

A cat, named Minnie, which I am rather allergic too.

Netflix description:

Nineteen-year-old Johnny (Vincent Spano) is a charismatic but ruthless gangster, running the mob’s drug trade in Alphabet City — New York’s toughest neighborhood, on the lower East Side of Manhattan.

(oh wait, there’s more)

But when Johnny’s bosses order him to torch the building where both his mother and sister live, Johnny refuses. Now a marked man, he must find a way to protect his family and get out of Alphabet City before the mob takes him out … for good!

Brilliant.

After using Google’s Picasa for a while, I’ve decided to (finally) start using Flickr. I’ve loved the site since day one, but I haven’t used it much for sharing photos. I’ve preferred Picasa’s integration into my Google contacts for very selective photosharing, and while that is still the case Flickr is just too good not to use. It’s great for photos that are OK for public consumption (like cat photos) where I think Picasa is still the way to go for more private stuff (family gatherings, etc) just because so few people that I share images with are on Flickr while many of them have Gmail accounts. I’m still avoiding putting too many images on Facebook, because I (like most people) have too many non-friend contacts to make it a good place for photosharing.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/salcangeloso/

Ping me if you know me. (Good litmus test–do you have my phone number).

btw- That is my gf’s new cat. Most of my Flickr photos at the moment are of her (the cat).

Sorry for the lack of activity around here. I’ve been really busy at work and Geek.com has really been getting a huge chunk of my attention. I’ve also noticed that my RSS burden has been increased over the last few months rather significantly, so I’m reading a lot more online which is great, but also very time consuming. It’s time for some optimization there.

I have been trying to get outside, away from the computer, more as well. It’s a struggle, but it seems prudent, especially given the season.

View the fruits of my labor:

http://friendfeed.com/salcan?format=atom

http://www.geek.com/users/SalCan/