Miro Tea

I stopped by Miro Tea in Ballard today to work on a presentation for school (and, in retrospect, to reformulate my philosophy on blogging). It's a cool place. I recommend checking it it out. They have good prices and a nice atomosphere. $4 for Earl Grey served in a glass Bodum pot warmed by a tealight. About the same price as a latte somewhere else, but larger volume and it stays warm for longer (another blog post I deferred was on my pet peeve concerning Seattle coffee shops that serve their coffee in bowls instead of mugs- the surface area to volume ratio is way off and your coffee ends up getting cold before you can finish it. Not so with the tealight-warmed pot! It stays warm for hours while you loiter).

Reminds me of getting a pot of tea at the shop on campus at Lancaster University for about 1 pound and it would last for 6 hours while you were craming for your immunology final exam which you put off studying for the whole semester because you were in England and the only grades were the midterm and the final, and there were no homework assignments...but I digress.

The atmosphere is also nice- bamboo, burlwood, and cast concrete fixtures. Danish Modern chairs. Cool art.

Tour of California

Does any one else find it ironic that the Tour of California bike race is sponsored by Amgen, the biotech company that got its start making erythropoietin? (Epo can be used by cyclists and other endurance athletes for blood doping) Isn't that kind of like a Steroid Manufacturer's Association Home Run Derby?

personal epublishing

essays, blogs, microblogging, links, status updates, etc.

Personal website, Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Blogger...so many options with overlapping functions.

I haven't really found the ideal way to manage online communication. I currently do this primarily through Facebook status updates, notes, links to articles, and rarely by updating my blog. Sometimes though I would like to write a status update that's about a paragraph long. Clearly too long. But I consider it too trivial to write a blog post about. And also off topic from what I'd like my blog to be about: science, medicine and society. On the other hand, I rarely update my blog and when I do it comes out more like an essay that I spend a couple of hours writing, editing, inserting links & formating them to popup in a new window, uploading pictures, etc.

I also sometimes run out of room to comment on an article link shared on Facebook. These should probably be blog posts instead. So I'm going to be more active about using my blog as a communication tool and relax my criteria for what's on topic. There will probably still be a lot of medicine/science content. But also other interests like politics, art/design, business/economics, random observations and other stuff I've been up to or thinking about. Which I guess is the point of a blog.

testing image uploads

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