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.

I like Starbucks. There, I said it. I'm sure Steve will be spiking my next coffee order and I'll have to start sleeping with my eyes open, but there is no denying the truth. In my defense, however, it is not for the reasons you may think. I'm not a slave to the corporate machine, I'm not a caffeine junkie, I don't like huge sizes and I certainly don't want a shot of vanilla and whipped cream in my cappuccino. The many faults of Starbucks, which have been flogged to death all over the web, are superfluous to my reasons. I want to focus on a few changes over the last year and whether or not they are nothing more than marketing ploys; the introduction of the 'Pike Place Roast' in the USA and the switching to Fair Trade in the UK.

Fact, here are over 15000 Starbucks in the world! - WikiAnswers
They may have gone off message since opening their doors, but Starbucks is the largest coffee chain in the world. That may be a negative to some people, but try to consider what the world of coffee was without Starbucks. Have a look in any 'greasy spoon' cafe in the UK and you will see the remnants of the old way of doing things, filter pots left on the hotplate all day, Nescafe instant in bulk quantities, espresso, if it can be called that, from dirty machines and oily beans. The sort of thing we see in the very worst of coffee shops, where coffee is not considered a culinary product, but just another commodity to sell. With the spread of Starbucks has come the spread of coffee shop and most importantly, espresso culture. It's very unlikely that you favourite coffee house today would exist without the legitimacy given to gourmet coffee by Starbucks. You can't buy marketing like that, well you can, they did...

Howard Schultz, taking a leaf from Steve Jobs' book, has returned to the company and earlier this year, announced a series of changes, bringing back manual machines, shorter times keeping brewed coffee and the Pike Place Blend, roasted and delivered to stores within two weeks of brewing. Recognising and attempting to fix mistakes is a quality which in business these days, is avoided like the plague. Pike Place Roast which for anyone unaware and/or leaving outside the US, is a new house blend with a much more palatable roast profile. Whereas the older 'House Blend' was infamous for being darkly roasted and tasting "charred," Pike Place (named after Starbucks original location in Seattle) is a little lighter roasted and from my own experiences this summer, a bit sweeter and more balanced. Along with the new blend comes the obligatory rebrand of cups and store cards bearing the original logo (more or less) and a reemphasis on freshness, which is when I started taking notice.

I bought a 1lb of Pike place back in August and even after a week or two it was still enjoyable. During that time I grabbed a bag of House Blend from my local Starbucks, in Belfast and brewed it up using the same method as the Pike Place. For some reason which I have yet to understand, I didn't actually make any hard notes during this time, not very scientific I know, but I can say with certainty that even 'freshly' out of the bag, the House Blend already tasted like "burnt tarmac."

It left me hoping that Starbucks Europe would make a similar move, but the logistics of roasting and transport within Europe would be more challenging than in the US. That said, if The Coffee Collective can do it, why can't Starbucks?

Speaking of Europe, that brings me back to their other big change, switching to Fairtrade, across their range, in the UK. There has been plenty written about Fairtrade and its branding, how it's not actually as fair as it makes out; the speciality industry has touted the direct trade and relationship coffee as viable alternatives, that give more, financially and technically, back to the producers. You can find articles on fair trade here, here and here, to name a few.

Unlike the Pike Place Roast and improvements in quality and freshness, the Fairtrade switch seems to be more marketing genius, than helping farmers. However that is only my speculation and in turn, my dilemma. The real effect of both these changes remain unseen. The important thing is, that no matter where we stand on the Fairtrade issue, we need to make sure that ethical buying is not to salve our own conscience, but is because we care about our fellow man.

I'm sure many of you have will know what I'm talking about when I say it is very hard to keep track of all your online social interactions these days, tweets, blog posts, comments, bookmarks, videos and more!

To help us keep our sanity as we traverse the Social Multiverse™ several useful tools have been created; FriendFeed will aggregate most of the sites you contribute to into one twitteresque page, allowing comments to be made in one place, but unfortunately outside of the environment of the original post. Other tools, such as coComment or co.mments, keep track of conversations by aggregating your comments, from multiple sites, into one place, with browser plugins installed to automate it.

I've been using both these solutions for sometime now, to both feed my sidebar and help keep track of interesting discussions. Recently I've discovered Yahoo! Pipes, which according to Wikipedia, is:

...a web application from Yahoo! that provides a graphical user interface for building applications that aggregate web feeds, web pages, and other services, creating Web-based apps from various sources, and publishing those apps.

I've used it to pull my feeds from blogs, twitter, youtube, flickr and any discussions I'm tracking all into one time ordered feed. Pipes that you create can be made public so that other users can create clones based on their information my source is available here, just paste in your feed URL's and you're good.

I have plans to modify my pipe further, as at the moment it is a fairly basic RSS aggregator and other examples on Yahoo! Pipes put it to shame.

What other methods do people use to keep track and stay current?

Our prayer meeting on Monday night had a visit from night Pastor Groza, of Bethany Baptist Church, Romania, and a group of operatic singers, the Pro Gospel Quartet, I think they are in Northern Ireland for a while touring around various churches and venues, if you get a chance to hear them you should, they are incredible, I have never heard such powerful songs, sung with such passion, they really were giving it everything! No linkage for you unfortunately, I can't seem to find any mention of them online, but they could give professional singers a run for their money. My hat also goes off to their pianist/organist who was equally as incredible and managed to blow up short the church organ, that's what I call power!

As some of you know, on the 8th of August this year I got married and the lads have been making digs that I haven't blogged since then because I'm under the thumb, "another good man down," they say.

I wouldn't blame the delay on marriage as that's not fair, nor would I blame my beautiful new wife for keeping me from blogging, but the change of dynamic; moving house, living together, turning that house into a home, all take time and have been top priority for me. I've found my workload to be a lot heavier lately and and after a long busy day in work its hard to find something to write.

However, the break has done me good, now nearly five months on, I'm still happily married and writing the first of several planned posts and who knows what else.

On the 1st December after little more than one week's warning, Chancellor Darling (Not pictured below) lowered the UK VAT rate from 17.5% to 15% and the nation rejoiced.

On the same day the Irish VAT rate rose from 21% to 21.5% they weren't quite as happy. Very few people spared a thought, however, for the programming and IT support companies that had to push out updates and talk almost IT illiterate clients through changing updating their software. Yesterday I was one of those people, stepping in to fill the breach and stem the endless tide of phone calls and I have never been more grateful, in my life that I no longer work tech support.

That's all I have to say about that.

After working out I grabbed a cup of coffee from the Peet's stall in the hotel lobby, it wasn't great coffee but I was initially pleasantly surprised to see that the staff were undergoing retraining, right up to the point where I heard the trainer talking to the barista. This wasn't some young college kid, but an older Hispanic lady, who is very pleasant and upbeat, (although in Florida it's uncertain just how real the pleasantries really are). The trainer was a young well dressed White woman, whom I assume is from the local head office; I have ran, participated in and evaesdropped on enough Batista training sessions to know the way she was talking to this lady was in no way appropriate regardless of her competancy in making coffee. Talking down to and criticising someone to colleagues via the phone, infront of both the trainee herself and customers is wrong, there is nothing else to say about it. Hopefully she'll make it through the retraining and may I suggest the head office staff could do with some retraining on manners! Andrew

I'm in Florida on honeymoon and the last think I expected to find was a front page article in the Wall Street Journal about latte art! I'm not sure if it's available online, but it actually seems like a very balanced article, going into the potential expense and "over thinking" that can go into producing latte art. It even mentions our very own James Hoffman, and his crazy latte art challenge, among other famous names, David Schomer and Mark Prince etc. I'm still shocked that they found a place for a story like this on a front page otherwise dedicated to the ongoing conflict in Georgia. More news from the colonies is on it's way; Ive been to Starbucks to try their new Pike Place roast. Andrew

I hope you've got your glasses nice and full, there's a whole stack of toasts coming! We'd like to thank you all for coming today, it wouldn't have been half the day it was without our friends and family around us, so thank you.

We'd also like to thank our bridal party for their help today, for the bridesmaids, Tanya and Lousie, our ushers Brian and Richard, my groomsman Ashley, Kyle for his reading, to Jessica for singing and of course Mark, my best man. Just remember bro, go easy on me in your speech. The advantage of getting married first is that I can repay the favour when its your turn! I'd like you to raise your glasses and toast the wedding party.

A big thank you goes to both my mum and dad and my new mother and father in law, who have so warmly welcomed me into their family. The love and support from both our parents and the Godly homes that we have grown up in, have made a huge impact on both our lives and is part of the reason that we both know the Lord today. Lets raise our glasses to our parents

Of course then we have the most important person of the day, Lila, who, Im sure you'll all agree looks absolutely stunning.

As I'm sure you all know Lila and I are both saved, and Church has been and is an important part of our lives, infact Lila and I first met in church, all those years ago, but of course being a typical teenage boy, I had very interest in girls and am sorry to say didn't really notice her. But as you know Lila likes to get her way and eventually, after a few years, I noticed her, which goes to show, persistence pays off. We started going out on the 6th of September 2003, after  bravely asked her out via text message. I was a bit more brave when it came to proposing however, I did that in person! However any rumours that some people might spread. about how the shock put Lewis in hospital are completely untrue. I want to thank Lila for agreeing to marry me, I'm still not sure what I did right to make her say yes, but she did and now today I feel like I'm the happiest man in the world. So please everybody raise your glasses in a toast to Lila

Finally I'd like to thank our Lord and Saviour for all the help and strength he has given us over the years and would hope, now that we are married that we can now walk together, united in Him.

Thank you

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="203" caption="Burning Blackberries"][/caption]I've been nearly two weeks since the arrival of my iPhone 3G, signified by the burning of effigies of blackberries throughout the country. And since that time I've been patiently waiting for a native Wordpress application that would rival the TypePad app; yesterday was to be that day, or was it. Although not quite as disappointed with it as @cimota, there still are bugs to be worked out, like why I had to reinstall my blog to get it to work. I'm also concerned with my comment on the support site is still unapproved, are they trying to hide their bugs?

Regardless I'll stick with it for a while yet, I'm hoping for a quantum leap in features for version 1.1, in the way that Facebook 1.1 improved on it's initial false start.

Andrew

An interesting article, the author states that

"trust has faded in modern society because of the collapse in marriage and the family, the breakdown of working-class communities, and more fluid job structures"

I couldn't agree more, the sheer selfishness of people never ceases to amaze me, driving and shopping in Tesco on a Saturday afternoon are too good examples, but society as a whole is so wrapped up in itself that it is actually blind to its own condition.

Displacing the blame for the human condition - Telegraph.

I came across a renewable energy company in Chesire called,Sky Flair. After reading their about page I'm not sure how I'd feel about them installing equipment for me. Perhaps I am being a snob, could it be that this an open and honest approach to communicating with customers or a amateurish and unprofessional way to present you company?

It's a sleepy Sunday afternoon for me, after BarCamp Belfast yesterday and the media team in Church this morning. Time I think to relax, catch up on some reading and enjoy my new sample roasts.

I've been really enjoying coffee from South America lately, especially from Guatemala and El Salvador. Guatemala Finca San Francisco Tecuamburro is a personal favourite and I've been trying several styles of roast to bring out the natural sweetness in these beans and after the cup (or three) I've just had, I think I'm nearly there

I hope to attend BarCamp Belfast this month, held in QUB on 21st June. BarCamp, for anyone that doesn't know, is a sort of un-conference, where people gather together "to share and learn in an open environment." To take the concept one step further I think of it as an "analog" wiki of sorts. Attendees arrange among themselves, before hand and during the event, who will speak and on what topic. Its like a 21st Century Quaker IT meeting.

I think its a great idea for people in similar fields to meet together and share their knowledge, ideas and have a bit of craic. Just look around the Web (2.0) today and you can see so much openness, with open APIs allowing unparalleled integration of apps. Collaboration spurs innovation!

If you still dont' know what I'm talking about, Wikipedia is your friend.

Andrew

You know who I'm talking to!

Northern Ireland is a land which in the past has been blessed of God, but living here ourselves we may not fully realise the extent of the blessing. It only takes one look to the British mainland or south to the Irish Republic to see how previously God fearing lands are in the grip of “evangelical” atheism, militant Islam, and worse, complete indifference and apathy. Apathy so bad that many adults have never been to church even as a child. When speaking to people in Northern Ireland is is generally assumed that they have had some sort of church upbringing; Protestant and Catholic alike will have heard Bible stories and know who Jesus was. But without any “Christian” orientation in a life, a person will see the message you bring, of God's salvation as a strange alien concept.

Religion, especially Christianity is a taboo subject; atheists blame as the source of all the World's problems, a view taken up by many throughout the land. And to this background our message seems as bizarre and ridiculous as that brought by many cults like Scientology, whose beliefs we find laughable.A different approach must be taken to not just witness, but to educate as to what we witness about. Yes, we can live our life as a living testimony of what God has done for us, but if someone asked us why we lived in that way, telling them we are saved because Jesus died to save us from their sins, would seem as religious technobabble. It is a challenging problem, to understand this mind set, and find a way best suitable to witnessing to those with it, which will take much prayer and patience.

We must also pray that the plague of apathy does not take root here in Northern Ireland, for the seeds have already been sown, parents no longer send their children out to Church or Sunday School and the association of Biblical Christianity with the Catholic Church due to the Ecumenical movement, has tarnished our reputation.We must witness to the young now while there still remains a generation that are willing to hear, for once the foundation of youth has been removed the church will crumble. God forbif we would let that happen.

And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. Mark 16:15,16

I was very impressed yesterday to find a special iPhone formatted page on sermonaudio.com.

SermonAudio have some great sermons in audio and video format, but until recently has been very much the domain of Windows Media users, with basic only podcast support and wmv video. Gradually over the past year they're support for iTunes and Web2.0 standards has been on the up; now with iPhone and iPod Touch support you can browse sermons on specially formatted pages, listen via Edge and watch video over wifi.

Anything that makes a site more accessible is a good thing in my book, although this feature may only appeal to geeks like me. Either way its a great addition to an already great resource.

Andrew

“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

Just a little something I made...

Andrew

One day, two surprises, but their showman ship is never in question. Without hype or fanfare Apple have released 4 new colours in the iPod Shuffle range (starting at the bargain price of £55) and my personal favourite, UK & Ireland specific Mac Ads, starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb, two UK comedians known for Peep Show, who I never found funny until now.

The original "Mac & PC" Ads are usually pretty witty, but these are outright hilarious (in a good British sort of way).
If you don't know what I'm talking about, then click here to watch, you won't be disappointed!

Andrew

Thats how many days are left until Lila and I get married, wow seems really close doesn't it?! As the stack of bridal magazines and cutouts grow I have to wonder why the groom is traditionally sidelined in wedding planning; I certainly know why I am, as we all know what would happen, but I can't believe that all grooms are full of hot air (Sorry!)



Magazine racks are filled with Men's magazines filled with grooming and syle advice, so why are men's roles in weddings (according to the media) relegated to a few pages on speech making and photos of nice shoes to wear?


I don't have an answer to this one, just wondering...

Andrew