This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004). This blog is one of the transitions for the new year. I've started it This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004). This blog is one This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004

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Go Figure

1:57 PM Saturday, May 28, 2005

[What is the capital of Rhode Island?]

One of the fascinating thing about writing a weblog is the unpredictability of the results.

When I started writing the Coffeeblog last December it was a way of combining my love for hanging out in cafes with a wish to be able to communicate regularly with a widening circle of face-to-face acquaintances. Plus, it was a cool way to fool around with my Tinderbox software, Photoshop, and CSS.

Within a few months I found that I had a world-wide readership (though what they actually read I didn't know) and that I had tapped into a local community of avant-garde internet techies, including people at Technorati, Laughing Squid and Flickr. And then I learned something about this same avant-garde (which I consider to be part of the today's cultural avant-garde, since a true art-world avant-garde probably withered away to extinction in the mid-1900's.)

Many of them were serious coffee aficionados. Historically, that is not too surprising, since coffee has provided meeting places and pharmacological enhancement for many of the avant-gardes of the past.

If, however, you have read the Coffeeblog before, you know that it is about a lot more than coffee. If there is one theme that keeps recurring as I write for the Coffeeblog, it is the never-ending series of unexpected coincidences and surprising twists of fortune, usually good ones, which characterize the Internet, the arts, and probably the universe in general.

The founding fathers of the USA, many (all?) of whom were Deists, often used the word Providence as a substitute for "God", and even named a town in Rhode Island for it.

I do not need any god to believe that Providence (is that the same as serendipity, synchronicity, Ayn Rand's premise of the benevolent universe, or the Luck of the Irish?) will bring me yet more readers to the Coffeeblog, more inspiration for things to write about besides How to Find a Decent Espresso in North America (stay tuned for that one), more and cooler software and internet networking tools, more surprisingly cool cameraphone images to upload to Flickr, and (who knows?) maybe even more money (but that I doubt.) And it will all happen in a totally unpredictable way.

Speaking of the Irish, BTW, the last I heard their high-tech industry was doing quite well. Is that luck? Or what?

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