Reid Burke

Personal

  • “Sorry, your coffee isn’t an artisanal ritual.”

    Marco Arment writes about coffee lovers who look down upon Keurig K-Cups:

    We’re the ones who keep creating, replacing, Kickstarting, and spending top dollar on ever-more-specialized equipment, even when it differs from established products only in arbitrary or purely decorative ways that have no discernable effect on the actual coffee (except maybe prolonging the process of making it).

    We’re the ones who obsess over every little detail of brewing technique as if they matter much more than they really do, making good coffee ever more alienating and confusing to casual coffee drinkers who don’t have time to study and fuss over it as much as we do. […]

    Maybe we’d get some of the Keurig fans to use our methods if we weren’t so pretentious, wasteful, expensive, and inaccessible ourselves. […]

    Our obsession with gear and “rituals” is only distracting them — and us — from the real problem: old, mediocre, or badly roasted beans.

  • The Invention of the AeroPress

    Zachary Crockett at Priceonomics brings us the story of Alen Alder’s company Aerobie and how a toy manufacturer started making coffee makers.

    The AeroPress was conceived at Alan Adler’s dinner table. The company was having a team meal, when the wife of Aerobie’s sales manager posed a question: “What do you guys do when you just want one cup of coffee?”

    A long-time coffee enthusiast and self-proclaimed “one cup kinda guy,” Adler had wondered this many times himself. He’d grown increasingly frustrated with his coffee maker, which yielded 6-8 cups per brew. In typical Adler fashion, he didn’t let the problem bother him long: he set out to invent a better way to brew single cup of coffee.

    I love my AeroPress. It really does make a great cup.

  • Placebo-philes

    Robert McGinley Myers:

    For me it started with a simple search for better headphones. I think I typed “best headphones under $50” into Google, and what came back was a series of lists, like this one or this one, ranking the best headphones at a series of price ranges. I settled on a pair pretty quickly, and when they arrived I loved them, but those lists had planted their hooks in my brain. How much better would my music sound if I were willing to spend just a little bit more?

    A fantastic read on the placebo effect on everything from sound gear to wine to alternative medicine. Via Marco.org, who wrote this week about his own search for better coffee and headphones.

  • “Mr. Market”

    Warren Buffet, from his Letter to Shareholders, 1987 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report:

    Ben Graham, my friend and teacher, long ago described the mental attitude toward market fluctuations that I believe to be most conducive to investment success. He said that you should imagine market quotations as coming from a remarkably accommodating fellow named Mr. Market who is your partner in a private business. Without fail, Mr. Market appears daily and names a price at which he will either buy your interest or sell you his.

  • Panther Beach

    A week ago was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which I spent visiting Panther Beach in Santa Cruz with friends. It’s not the most accessible beach. The parking “lot” is a patch of dirt off Highway 1 and getting down to the beach involves a steep hike. But it’s a great spot if you can reach it. We got up near the tide pools and took these shots as the sun retreated on this winter evening. All shots taken with an iPhone 5.