A few weeks ago I started my own project and corresponding Facebook group for what soon became known as the Open Bible Project. The goal being to produce a version of the Scriptures for various e-book readers which, within the constraints of the device, has a useable user interface and readable layout.

Many, many versions already exist around the web, but either have hideously formatted text or are far too unwieldy to fit into typical usage patterns for the Bible. Of course others have been working on this problem, Osnova has produced several Bibles and developed a jump to verse technique using the search function of the device. Type ge.1.10 and find and the reader will jump to the Genesis chapter 1 verse 10.

I've used a similar technique, by hiding a code for chapter using white coloured text (doesn't show on the device but is still searchable) you can enter Gen.1, Matt.1 etc and the reader leaps to the correct chapter. As far as the reading experience goes, each verse flow into one another, with verse numbers showing in a smaller font.

Very soon I'll have an Open Bible Project website up and running, hosting the scriptures and various reference books online. Each user of the website will be able to annotate, highlight and link text across books of the Bible and the reference library. This customised version of the Bible will be available (freely) as a download for use on your reader, bringing those highlights, notes and links with it.

When no one sticks to them? After reading Alan's post on 4x4s parked badly at Sainsburys, it reminded me of something that's really got on my nerves lately, people that park in parent and baby spaces, that have no children with them, sometimes even be a work van!
The worst culprits seem to be found at Tesco Banbridge and although security have advised to complain to management, they claim it keeps happening and nothing is ever done long term to resolve it. What's doubly frustrating is that Tesco have a parent and baby club which they get you to sign up to and in return, give you a "parking pass" of sorts to allow you to use these spaces. A good idea in principle, but I've never noticed anyone use them, but besides that, what's the point of this scheme if it isn't going to be enforced?

We've got our Google Wave invites and while we figure out what it actually does and wait for what comes next, all we really have is another method to communicate with each other, that we actually have to login to and check. Unlike email, twitter and facebook which we are being prompted about regularly and are in the habit of checking, whole conversations could be going on in wave that we won't realise until we decide to give it another go next month and see what the fuss is all about. But now thanks to the Prowl iPhone app, we can have push notifications coming from the desktop wave client wrapper, Waveboard

Here's the steps you'll need to get started.

• First off it's really handy if you have a spare computer which you leave running, so you get notifications when you're out.


• You'll need Growl for this to work


• Prowl for iPhone and the Prowl plugin


• In the Growl system prefs make sure that the default notification is set to Prowl


• Visit http://www.getwaveboard.com and download the installer and let it do it's thing (Mac Only)


• Install and run Waveboard. At the moment it's a wrapper for the website but with a few nice features added; hotkeys, status bar icon etc

What should happen is when you get a new wave, or an existing wave is updated, Waveboard will send the notification to Growl which in turn will Push out the Prowl app on your trusty iPhone and look like this:

Waveboard also offer an iPhone app which can be launched from the Prowl notification, it's £0.59 and is'nt much more than a wrapper, although I'm sure it will improve over time, but I decided to stick with Google's webapp version. Just browse over to http://wave.google.com, accept the warning that your browser isn't supported and you should see webapp version of Wave. At this point you can add it as a bookmark to the homescreen, giving you a nice Wave icon and remove those browser controls. It's flakey but it quite useable.

I'm not sure what will come from Wave, it could be the next Gmail, or the next Orkut, either way it'll be an interesting journey.

[gallery columns="4" lightboxsize="full"]

Sounds tasty right? Well as tasty as it may be it's not the food and drink I want to talk about. That's the title of my wife Lila's blog (@mrsbeanandgone) which she started yesterday.

It's only one post for now, but I'm sure when she finds time out from looking after our 7 week old daughter, we'll be hearing more from her.

Check it out - Coffee and Chocolate Cake

I've been using the Amazon Kindle DX, in the UK, for a while now and have grown to love it's ability to display PDF, more than any other feature. Until recently once feature which I had never really used was subscribing to Newspapers, that is until I discovered Calibre.

Calibre is a free, open source, cross-platform ebook management software. It's like iTunes (the way it used to be) for books, but kinda uglier. Looks may not be it's strong point, but it is great for managing your library, converting formats (DRM free of course), renaming books and meta information individually or en masse. One feature I hadn't made use of, was it's ability to generate a newspaper from an RSS feed. What surprised me even further was that on the DX, the newspaper displayed in the exact same way, with a section list etc, as the newspapers from Amazon. Very nice when the blog or news site you use doesn't have and issue to buy on Amazon, even nicer when you're in the UK and Amazon have blocked purchases from outside the US.

But wait, it doesn't stop there, Calibre goes as far as to contain "recipes" which are used to scrape text from certain websites. Web page scraping might be a controversial feature, but if you want a newspaper created from BBC News or a your unread Google Reader articles, then there's a recipe for that. It's even possible to customise your recipe by adding new feeds, so my BBC Newspaper now contains a section for news in Northern Ireland just after the headlines. You can see how it turns out, below.

[gallery link="file" order="DESC"]

Anyone visiting Belfast recently could hardly miss the construction going on along the banks of the Lagan. Rising above it all is the extremely tall and growing Obel Tower; here's what Wikipedia has to say:

The Obel Tower is a building currently under construction in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Costing £85 million and measuring 80.5 metres (265 ft) in height, the tower when completed is set to dominate the Belfast skyline. It will overtake the current tallest skyscraper in Ireland, Windsor House (80 m), also in Belfast. Developed by the Karl Group, the Obel Tower is located on Donegall Quay on the River Lagan beside the Lagan Weir.

My brother, Mark, an architecture student at UUJ, recently got a look around inside, here are a few of his photos. Just look at how small the other buildings are and he wasn't even at the top!

[gallery link="file"]

As explained yesterday, the blog had a slight mishap which resulted in me spamming twitter, well his is what I've been up to. I'm trying to link the various social networks I make use of, through the blog, outputting to twitter and Facebook; one look at my blog will show my lifestream of posts, photos, videos, bookmarks and links in one neat time-ordered list.

So far delicious and two flickr accounts are being imported and a Feedburner feed of all the posts and twitter and Facebook updates going out.

Anyone following my twitter feed (@grib) got a bit of a shock last night as they were bombarded by around 50 tweets, over a period of a few minutes. Sorry about that!

What happened was that I was trying to link a few social network sites together; I wanted photos posted to flickr to automatically create a blog post and then for the blog to send out a tweet. Sure you can do this with posterous, but any blog posts created have photos linked back to their site, not flickr.

Using RSS and the WP-O-Matic plugin I had planned for a new post to be created when new photos were added to flickr's RSS feed. But... I forgot I had the other plugin turned on, TwitterTools which automatically sends out a tweet for each post and you can image what happened.

So for anyone following me in various clients including SMS (@wiseguyrussell), I humbly ask for your forgiveness and promise that next time I'm working without enough sleep, I'll be more careful.

I've had a few requests since posting this on twitter, so here's your very own Kindle DX "Don't Panic" screensaver, which can be installed using this hack.

As mentioned by Alan, Lisburn and Hillsborough Free Presbyterian Churches held a joint Creation Weekend, with speaker Paul Taylor from Answers in Genesis UK. I got my hands on the recordings thinking some people might have been interested but put off by the venue (as were a couple of attendees who left during the hymns and prayer but returned to hear Paul). This is his talk from Saturday night in Lisburn, entitled "200 Lost Years" it talks about the life of Charles Darwin and his legacy.

Apologies for the poor quality, it wasn't me doing the video...

I took the time today for a little bit of overdue DIY and built a rack for pour-over/filter cone coffee. We'll be bringing this out at the next BEAN AND GONE stall at the Lisburn Farmer's market, along with a whole variety of coffees to brew on it, more on that soon.

 If anyone wants one of these, we're thinking of building them and selling them for around £35-40. Contact @grib if you're interested.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

  <p>  <a href="http://posterous.com/">Posted via email</a>   from <a href="http://andrewgribben.posterous.com/diy-filter-cone-rack">Grib's Stuff</a>  </p> 

I'm probably breaking all the rules, but I'm going to start with a conclusion, the Amazon Kindle DX is an amazing device. End of post...

...Or at least it would be if I lived in the USA. The Kindle with it's built-in "Whispernet" allows for purchasing and downloading books from Amazon and browsing Wikipedia and the web freely (apart from book cost obviously) until your heart's content, providing you have cellular (Sprint?) coverage in the area. Living in the UK, I'm somewhat out of that coverage area, so even after crossing the hurdle of ordering from an Amazon.com account, delivering to a US address and then getting it brought back here, you're limited to USB only transfer. After all that is it still appealing? Like the man from delmonte, I say "Yes!"

Fair enough you are losing some of the best additional features of the Kindle, but let's remember, what they are additional features. The Kindle DX is the e-book reader that makes other readers like the Sony and even Kindle 2, cry and run away.
It's got a big 9.7" highly contrasted e-ink screen, about (haven't actually checked) 3.5GB of storage (which I've now filled), it's slim, light, looks cool, renders PDF, but more important than all that, you can actually enjoy an e-book like a real book! I know the purists out there are going to wax lyrical about paper, the feel of a book and bla, bla bla... You know what? I don't care. I love books too, but if I'm going on holiday or doing some development work, the last think I want is lugging a suitcase/bag around filled with books, especially text books.

That's why the Kindle DX, in my eyes, is a winner, it's an iPod for books, I can still have all the classics on my fuax-intellectual bookshelves, but if I'm going to leave the house and need a half-dozen iPhone dev books, I'll be talking the Kindle DX with me. And on a technical note, the refreshing of the e-ink screen is not as jarring as I expected, and performance wise it can open most books and PDFs about as quickly as an iPhone 3G can open an app :P

Of course, before I even got a book on the device I'd already installed a hack from here which gave me SSH access and after a bit more jiggery-pokery let me share out my MacBook's internet connection and browse the Amazon Store on the Kindle. Important note if you plan on doing this yourself the one piece of advice I can give is this:

Register the device with your Amazon.com account while it's still in the US.

Otherwise, although you can browse the store, without registering, you can't make any purchases or use the web bowser via the reverse tether. Some might say it's a bit pointless anyway since you have to be connected to a PC anyway, but I'd still like the option, for completeness sake if nothing else.

I'll be waiting for a UK/Europe release and further playing with the device, but most of all I'll be reading.

If you've any questions or thoughts, you can catch me on twitter @grib

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See and download the full gallery on posterous

  <p>  <a href="http://posterous.com/">Posted via email</a>   from <a href="http://andrewgribben.posterous.com/feile-fm">Grib's Stuff</a>  </p> 

We had a bit of a discussion last night at Xcake about the MacBook sleep time. Since switching to Intel chips MacBooks use what is called Safe Sleep, which suspends your RAM to Hard Disk when you shut the lid. The standard habit of a Mac user since PowerPC days was to shut the lid and throw in your bag, however on safe sleep it can take between 25 and 45 seconds to actually sleep, during that time the disk is likely still spinning.

  <p>  <a href="http://posterous.com/">Posted via email</a>   from <a href="http://andrewgribben.posterous.com/macbook-safe-sleep">Grib's Stuff</a>  </p> 

The ever pleasant, ever knowledgeable Steve Leighton of Has Bean fame, kindly lent me a prototype coffee roaster last month at the cost of a review. Being me, I promptly got caught up forgot about it and so last night was actually the first time I got to power it on.

For those of you that have never heard of the Behmor 1600, it's a home coffee roaster that's been on sale in the States for a while now and the developer of it will soon(?) be releasing a model that works on the juicier 240V we have at this side of the Atlantic. What's so special about this roaster you ask? Well as Tom at Sweet Maria's says "There's finally a home coffee roaster that can truly do a full pound of coffee!" that's 453g in new money. That's a great weight, roughly twice what I can roast in my Gene Cafe and it has a host of amazing features, quiet roasts, smoke free, consistent roasts etc.

So what did I think of it?
Well first off, it's a great size, pretty much the same a our microwave, which means it can happily sit on the worktop and not look like a warp core which keeps my wife happy.


The control panel looks quite complicated and the manual even more so. I can almost forgive that, as the major of users will be coffee geeks, but I had to read it through twice just to be sure I was doing things right and that does seem excessive, either that I was just having a really stupid day, who knows?

The smokeless filter is a nice touch and does a really good job up to a Full City (ish) level, after that you're likely to get a charcoal'd bean anyway, but as a lb of colombian decaff found out last night, no amount of smoke filtering will help when your beans roasted to the point of starting a fire. Which brings me to the negative...

Visibility. Frankly it's terrible. Due to the nature of the machine you really have to open the door and remove the chaff tray during the roast (which will affect the internal temperature) to have a good look at the beans. The above problem happened because I ended up shining a maglite in to see how the roast was getting on and completely misjudged it. This paragraph was originally going to be quite scathing, but I found out after cleaning there is actually a light inside the roaster (the clue being the button marked "light" on the panel. So maybe I was having a stupid day after all) however the bulb in this model wasn't working, I'm assuming it's just went during transit/usage or because it's a protoype, but I'll get that replaced today and I'm sure it'll be a help.

In summary, the Behmor 1600 is an innovative roaster which is intended to live in your kitchen, like any other appliance, with a wide range of temperature profiles and settings it more than makes up for over complicated instructions and will probably help you understand the coffee roasting process better anyway.

In the next part of my review I'll be looking at the pre-set curves and range of roasts available and then wrap up by comparing and cupping roasts against my other home roasters.

Remember these are just my initial thoughts and I will continue to make posts as I roast with it more.

This coming Saturday, 6th June, Castle Gardens hosts the latest Lisburn Farmer's Market.


Rising above past criticism and terrible weather, the May market was success for all involved, both traders and most importantly customers. The summer-like weather, donkey rides, Art on the Rails and the market itself created a enjoyable experience for all and drew in new visitors, with the tent being packed all day long.

We'll be there again this Saturday, with a wide range of BEAN AND GONE artisan coffee beans and serving drinks too. This month we'll be selling some exciting single origins coffees that aren't available on our website, including; Guatamala Cup of Excellence Perla Anexos and a new Kenyan coffee, Kitamaiyu Estate AA .

Hopefully the great weather will hold and we'll see you there!

Available now in the iTunes Store, Find Me Coffee will show you the nearest speciality coffee shop, cart or roastery.

This is possibly the world's shortest post, but I'm really, really enjoying (at least learning) developing applications for iPhone. It's such a beautiful platform and SDK. I've already one app approved (pending contracts) and about to submit my second after only two days development time. That's not from cutting corners or bad coding, but because so much of the work is done for you by Xcode. I've taken the week off work to do some serious coding, so I may be off twitter for the next few days, but at least now you know where I'll be :)

I was pleasantly surprised after heading home from Open Coffee Lisburn tonight, to find a nice email from Apple telling me the Exile Coffee "Find Me Coffee" app was now "Ready for sale"

Unfortunately it's not that simple, I seemed to have overlooked part of my banking setup on iTunes Connect. I'll get that sorted out right now, but hopefully the app will be ready available soon. If you're developing for the iPhone yourself, take heed from me, don't cut corners, fill in details properly and you'll be a 59c millionaire before you know it!

Open Coffee Lisburn meets tonight at 1900 hours, upstairs in Ed's Express up by Lisburn Omniplex. I wouldn't normally announce Open Coffee every week, Russell already has that covered, but I wanted to share a few things that are on my mind:

1. First off Javagate, obviously. I hope it doesn't hi-jack the whole meet-up but it seems to have been the proverbial straw which broke the camel's back and has infuriated up a lot of local people. The bureaucratic incompetence and "it's all about who you know" attitude in Lisburn City Council seems to get everyone's goat.


2. Secondly, the fact in trying to organise a meeting on a Tuesday night in a "city" we suddenly couldn't find a venue, apart from in what is now a burger bar. Even if we had waited until Wednesday night, Market Lane Cafe closes at 7pm with only Cafe Latte staying open late (Wed-Sat until 9PM). Why can't we have late night openings every night? Speaking from experience, (and you can check with many other business owners) the council and police are only interested able to focus on areas with a high footfall (and high amount of existing civil disturbance) namely the Omniplex. Outside the complex and you are completely an utterly alone. Don't count on the security cameras either, we're not even sure that they work and when they do are only pointed at the ATMs.

Too many animal metaphors in one paragraph, apologies.

Coffee is a passion for me, anyone who has talked to me, knows I could wax lyrical about it. I thoroughly enjoyed being at last month's Farmer's Market and spent the following four weeks looking forward to it, preparing new beans and telling everyone that would listen about how great it was to have something like this in Lisburn. Yesterday, despite being there to sell BEAN AND GONE coffee beans I was told, mid-market, to stop giving away sample drinks, because it was affecting the business of another trader. Annoyed and offended, I sent out a quick tweet and was shocked by the near instant support of the local online community. Russell (@wiseguyrussell) has posted about it on his blog and others @blackconfetti, @odle2, @maramgrass, @stuartgibson, @wiredbob expressed their indignation, both in person and online.

People have been talking about free trade and the unfairness of having a market that allows no duplication. I signed up for the market knowing this and accepted that I couldn't sell coffee drinks and only give samples away. I wanted to write a detailed timeline of what has been happening and allow everyone to make up their own minds.

• October 18th 2008
  The first Farmer's market in Castle Gardens, I popped in while walking past, thought it was great to see in Lisburn (and still do), I even bought a coffee from Javaman.
  Bumped into Sharon from Soupernatural (responsible for creating and organising the market), who suggested I come along to the next market held at:


• December 2008
  I Had planned to attend selling coffee beans, even contacted the council (the organiser being Suzanne Lutton) to get forms, however the fact that the council required a Risk assessment form the length of your arm and Public Indemnity Insurance put the brakes on that. Paying out around £80 on Insurance in what was thought, at the time ,to be a one-off seemed like a bit steep, add to the that the cost of the pitch, being nearly double that of the likes of St George's market.
  I stopped by the market anyway, bought some nice food, (noticed Javaman wasn't there this time) and again talked to Sharon from Soupernatural who told me I should have came along anyway and let their insurance cover me. She told me the market was going to start back and go monthly from:


• February
  I saw a banner go up for the Lisburn Farmer's Market on 7th March and contacted Sharon to see if it was ok to come along.
  I got a call back the next day, from Suzanne Lutton from Lisburn City Council, telling me that although they'd be happy to have me at the market, I wouldn't be able to trade using Soupernatural's insurance. Understandable really, so I arranged my own, as well as ordering in green beans, packaging, signage etc, only to get another call back from Suzanne telling me that Phil from Javaman had expressed concern about me selling coffee drinks. An arrangement was made that I would only sell beans and equipment, so as not to affect his business and comply with the non-duplication terms of the market. With all that sorted out I got ready for:


• Saturday 9th March: First Monthly Market
  Although it was a freezing, wet and overcast day, we had a successful day and as I mentioned above, a lot of fun. So there was no doubt that we planned to go back in:


• March
  I got back in touch with Suzanne at the council just to check everything was ok for the next market, she told me it was and checked that I was fine with only doing samples. From here on out I'll break down what happened on the day:


• Saturday 5th April
  0815
  Setup my tent outside the main marquee, got completely soaked and had a short chat with Javaman, I should add that nothing was mentioned about us selling coffee beans


• 0930
  Was asked again by Suzanne "are you only serving samples" despite having already answered this repeatedly. Suzanne's exact words were "he (Phil from Javaman) saw you carrying in an espresso machine and is freaking out"


• 1100 (ish)
  Several customers expressed annoyance at not being able to buy a coffee (drinks) from us, although as before I let them know they could buy from Javaman at the back of the tent. It was also noticed that all the other market traders had been provided with printed signage.


• 1215
  Sharon from Soupernatural (not the council organiser) came over to our stall and told us we would have to stop giving out samples as it was affecting Phil's trade and there just wasn't enough footfall to justify two traders with the same product. She said that Suzanne from the council would be over to speak to me soon:


• 1400
  Not exactly "soon" and having turned away dozens of customers looking for samples I finally got to speak to Suzanne by going to find her. Suzanne explained the same reasons as Sharon, however she agreed that we should be allowed to give out samples but in small espresso sized cups only. We asked to have it in writing and the following month be inside the main marquee, she said that would be fine.
  We brought up the issue that the market would never grow, or be competitive while they still had a no duplication policy, Suzanne told us she had at least another 6 traders lined up to come (which I think would be great) but they can't as they overlap with existing traders.
  On the issue of the printed banners which the other traders got, we were told that we hadn't one because our spot was outside the main marquee and they wouldn't survive well outside. This was understandable and it was pointed out the other outside spot (for which the trader didn't show) didn't have one either.


• 1445
  Sharon came back and informed us that Suzanne (from the council, official organisers etc) should not have told us that we could give out samples at all and that an espresso size sample of filter coffee would stop people buying shots of espresso from Phil. I want to point out here that the standard of coffee and the culture of the UK and Ireland is that someone will not buy a shot of Espresso, unless they truly are a coffee lover, in which case a "shot" of filter coffee would not suffice or even be considered as the same thing. We were also told that we should not have been at the market at all as when I had first request to come in February, Phil from Javaman had said he would not be happy with me being there at all. Sharon says she passed this information back to Suzanne (although up to that point I had been dealing directly with Sharon) and that the fault was Suzanne's and the Council's for letting me come. She also pointed out that the banners were only printed for the other traders, whom she had invited and arranged with and that our roastery tent outside was nothing to do with her, it was between me and Suzanne. (This contradicted not only Suzanne's earlier reason for us not having signage, but also Sharon's own arguments about who had the say in the running of the market. One moment she has the authority to arrange things, the next we are "nothing to do with her"). It was left that, we had affected Javaman's business so much that he probably wouldn't be back and that it would damage her reputation as a trader as she had given her word that there would be no duplication, the direction of the conversation was thought the right thing to do would be to leave as us even attending the market was a mistake.


• 1530
  I packed up, paid my fee and was told  by Suzanne that she would be in touch, after having spoken to Sharon, so who knows what will happen next?

About Our Ratings

Our ratings are not intended to cause offense, but instead hope to promote quality and good practice in the coffee industry, directing business owners to the areas that need improvement, providing a better experience for all.

As such, the breakdown of our reviews, based on the sampling of a small cappuccino, is as follows:

Taste - Pretty self explanatry, how the coffee tastes. Marked out of 10, most fresh generic coffee's will receive a 7 or 8, outstandingly fresh and exciting coffees will be higher, with stale coffee (usually caused by filling the doser with ground coffee and leaving to sit, or not cleaning group heads between shots) will be lower.

Texture - The texture of the milk, also marked out of 10. Consistently smooth milk with little or no bubbles, known as microfoam, is the goal here. Frothing milk until it is bubbly and dry tends tomake it sour and points will be lower accordingly.

Temperature - Leading on from milk frothing, the coffee temperature, again out of 10 with 10 being the perfect drinking temperature, not too hot not too cold. Extreme heat (hotter than your hand can touch, around 140F) not only makes the milk sour, buttwill get you lower points; no one wants their mouth burnt!

Technical Ability - Marked out of 10, this is a look at the skill and training of the barista preparing the drink. Are they following industry best practices, or ritualistically sticking to bad/incorrect training. Also taken into account are the proportions of the drink, ie the ration of espresso to milk.

Appearance - Marked out of 5, this is not how the staff look, contrary to popular belief (you know who you are!) but is how the coffee is presented, if it is finished with any latte art, if there have been spills etc.

Atmosphere - The atmosphere marks relate to the cafe environment itself; is the establishment billed as a "coffee shop" but the main priority is food and a high turn over of customers. As it is not a major issue it is also marked out of 5.

The final score is calculated by adding these values together and doubling to give a mark out of 100

Exclusions - We have decided to exclude certain coffee chains from our reviews due to bad ratings across their stores. Currently O'Briens, The Streat, Costa Coffee, Cafe Nero and Starbucks are excluded. Although, as I alluded to in an earlier post, Starbucks Coffee, prepared primarily by fully automatic machines, is at least consistent.

Yesterday at 1700 GMT people from around the world came together to watch Barack Hussein Obama II become the 44th President of the United States of America. A few years ago, no one would believe such a diverse mix of people and countries would be so captivated by the inauguration of an American President, but after the hype and build-up of the past few months, it was thought that perhaps his speech would not deliver, those people were wrong.

President Obama knew not only the eyes of America, but the eyes of the world were upon him and his inaugural address, in this smaller interconnected world, reached out to everyone. Suddenly, it seemed that the whole of twitter, Facebook and everything in between were suddenly doing the same thing. As Obama set new challenges for the American people, a lot of us jumped for joy when he mentioned returning "science to its rightful place." I'm sure some of you reading this don't understand the implications, President Obama is a committed Christian, as am I, hopefully this will forever dispel the myths held on both sides of the debate that Christianity and Science cannot and do not go together. Science is not the work of the devil, but at the same time neither do we live in the "dark ages" or so desire to. I like my mobile phone, laptop, internet access, nuclear power, NASA, the Human Genome project and even the LHC. I read scientific journals and have a very rational and analytical mind.

Some seem to think that intelligence and reason go against believing in a "higher power." My intelligence and reason, as with President Obama, are not contrary too, but instead confirm my faith. Faith which does not come from clouded judgement, or impaired mental faculties, but a the very root of it, comes from the empirical evidence that there is a God. Others may complain that what I say is wrong, that faith comes from believing only, but I was a follower of science long before I was a Christian, it was the undeniable proof and complete lack of evidence of the contrary that not only led me to God, but continues with me today.

Those stupid atheist slogans on buses annoy me no end, this is how it would look if I had my way. I have respect for this guy there are very few people who would stand up for their faith, like that, anymore. Notice the word "faith" it's important, this isn't as simple, as I've seen trivialised on blogs that suggest "would a vegetarian refuse to drive a bus advertising bacon?" In my mind, as a Christian, the two cannot be equated and it is not only deeply offense, but also shows, sadly, just how out of touch and little understanding secular society has.

I had the opportunity to tag along to the UKBC Regionals in Hillsborough on Wednesday, camera in tow. The set-up was definitely biased towards the competitors and judges, leaving us photographers clamoring for good angles and light. So, I did my best.

Sadly, I was unable to stay long enough for Julia's turn at the machines!

[caption id="attachment_284" align="aligncenter" width="384" caption="Neli serving up her espressos"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_285" align="aligncenter" width="384" caption="One of the judges enjoys Neli's specialty drink!"][/caption]

The previous post has a shot of Neli preparing her cappuccinos.

[caption id="attachment_286" align="aligncenter" width="384" caption="Heather prepping her station"][/caption]

Here you can also see the fabulous Sanremo machine that was used in the competition!

[caption id="attachment_287" align="aligncenter" width="384" caption="Heather's specialty drink, halfway through the layering process"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_288" align="aligncenter" width="384" caption="Judges scoring Heather's finished specialty drink"][/caption]

These are just a few highlights of the winners at work. Congrats to ALL the competitors, especially the first-timers.