How Starbucks saved my life - Michael Gates Gill (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

Last week I borrowed a book from Dymphie that I'd heard about sometime last year. I'd been meaning to read it ever since. How Starbucks saved my life, by Michael Gates Gill.

Despite initial impressions this is not a book about some stockbroker or sysadmin that lives off of Starbucks' coffee exclusively. It's not about people who need coffee to get through their days unscathed. Nope...

To sum it all up, Mr Gill used to be a big shot exec in the New York marketing world. After a few bad choices in life and a few nasty turns in his luck he finds himself destitute and alone in the world. Now job, no clients, no wife and his kids moved away as well. Despite his upper class upbringing and his snobbish life so far, Mr Gill accepted a position at Starbucks after his sixtieth birthday. Getting by on low wages, doing menial jobs and serving people Mr Gill found more satisfaction than he'd ever had in his exec job.

Despite the rather bad dutch translation I sped through the book in about five hours. It really isn't that big of a read and it's nicely paced.

The reason why I wanted to read this book in the first place is that I've always had something stuck in the back of my head: things can always go wrong. It's very unlikely to happen, but there's always the off chance that something happens that prevents me from working in IT ever again. I dunno; maybe I develop a Linux allergy. ^_^; I've always told myself that, should it ever come so far, I'd never balk at menial jobs. I'd go flip burgers, work at a super market and in the evenings I'd clean offices. Sure, I wouldn't be able to do hard physical labour, but cleaning and cooking is definitely not below me.

An interview with Mr Gill is available on YouTube.

Posted in: bankrupt , coffee , new start , starbucks

OLPC Part 8: Starbucks Envy (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

I am at Starbucks. I was supposed to be cleaning, but I was talking with daecabhir (why did you choose an LJ name so hard to spell??)for awhile about Balticon PR, and then I started writing a comedy bit about Goth Parrots ("Polly gonna cut herself if she don't get a cracker"), but it was going nowhere fast. I got a migraine and then had to nap past it. Then I needed caffeine to clear out my head, so here I am at Starbucks.

In order to "save" my entry, I will just keep editing this entry. It's been hard to type this far. It's taken an hour. Why? Because people keep talking to me. "Oooh, is that the $100 laptop? I heard Intel quit them. I heard it was not $100! Wow, it's cool, though..." :)

I was going to upload a picture of me but Flickr is currently having database issues. I am finally using a mouse I got back when I worked at AOL. It was part of some gift pack I got when I worked Systems Operations. It's very small, and a little annoying normally, but perfect for this teeny laptop. It also has an auto-retractable cord, which is nice.

I installed SimCity and played that for a while. It works, but I couldn't get it to change speed or play sounds. Or save :( Posted in: olpc , starbucks