If you've been reading this blog for a while and you're completely puzzled as to where the different places I talk about actually are, I've added a map to make it easier for you to keep track.

Are you also one of those people who walk into a coffee shop and are slightly overwhelmed by all the different names they use in there? With wikipedia in hand, here is your guide to coffee...

• espresso
  A flavourful coffee beverage brewed by forcing hot water under high pressure through finely ground coffee. Ie. the strong Italian coffee with no additions. Usually when you order this one, you get about 4 teaspoons of liquid. As we will see, it is the common factor for many of the variants below.
• cappuccino
  A cappuccino is generally defined as 1/3 espresso, 1/3 steamed milk and 1/3 frothed milk.
• caffè latte
  A latte is prepared to the proportions of one third espresso and two-thirds steamed milk. Thus it has more milk than a cappuccino, and has a milder, milkier taste.
• café au lait
  A French coffee drink prepared by mixing coffee and scalded (not steamed) milk. It is similar to Italian latte, but made with drip- or more popularly French press pot coffee instead of espresso and with scalded instead of steamed milk in 1:1 ratio.
• macchiato
  Espresso with a tiny dollop of steamed milk. "Macchiato" simply means "marked" or "stained," and in the case of caffè macchiato, this means literally "espresso stained/marked with milk." Traditionally it is made with one shot of espresso, and significantly less milk or milk foam. However, some newer cafes tend to add steamed milk to the espresso in a 1:1 ratio, making it more like a miniature caffè latte.
• mocha
  Normally, a latte blended with chocolate.

That should do it, those are the ones I most commonly see.

Funny how some things completely elude you for a long time, then you see something that makes you think about it and suddenly you're thinking funny how this never came to mind before. We've all seen drunks on the streets, right? But have you seen a lot of women drunks? Why not, why wouldn't they be? Today I did see one, lady in probably her 50s carrying a small radio playing the Beach Boys' Surfin USA, with a bottle of beer in her other hand, standing in the street. Finally some progress for the feminist movement, this must be good news. Then, like a stab in the chest, as I walk on I see two more drunks. Male. Just when I thought they had a win..

Apparently the university decided some road work had to be done and now getting to and from the various buildings has become a problem, depending on rainfall as well as where they decide to excavate next. Little did I think of this today as I was headed for the Educatorium. On the way, there was a section closed off due to road work, with metal fences preventing any traffic. Today the fences were open on both sides, so I decided to go right through it. It was just sand on the asphalt anyway, I didn't give it much though. Almost at the end of the supposedly closed off area (where people walked freely), there was a section of asphalt missing, filled with sand. The gap was probably 1m long and I assumed it was just a thin layer of asphalt missing. As I ride over it, I see my front wheel sink into the sand, turns out it was a bit deeper than I thought. I was going at a reasonable speed, so when my front wheel finally popped out onto the asphalt on the other side, I had pretty much lost control of where I was going. Somehow I ended up crashing right into the metal fence, making a lot of noise. It was really weird, I'd never had anything like this happen before. I did a quick status check of the bike and everything seemed fine. Except the chain had come off in the front and tangled up around the pedal, so dragging it back in place got my hand rather black with grease. Later I would discover something happened to the gears, cause they now skip without warning.

I had a similar accident a few years ago, similar in that once again I didn't see it coming. I was in a hurry to get to school before they close at 11pm, I think I needed a printout or something. It was fairly dark, I was going down a steep hill and then onto a gravel road which again turned downwards. On the gravel, I made a turn and skid. It may have been October, we had had snow, but it had melted. Little did I know that under the dust where I skid, there was a nice layer of ice and there's no way I could have seen it. I hit my head on the ground, started bleeding and I've been much more careful on the bike ever since.

• Do you know how html forms work? Most people would probably say "no".
• But do you know how Google works? I'm gonna go out on a limb here and assume that most people would say "yes".

Why am I talking about this? Because I just found a cool feature in Firefox that I didn't know about before. To give a little background first.. have you ever wanted bookmark a search result? But they're not usually "bookmarkable", are they? Well you can, if you know how. It has something with how searches (or in general: form submissions) are handled on the server side. If the form is a post, then bookmarking the url in the navigation bar won't work. If the form is a get (eg. Google), then you can bookmark the search.

So picking up user patterns like that is what makes good software and Firefox has done something to make searching nicer for us. The idea is very simple, but it's the kind of thing that is done easily in software which is inconvenient to do manually by the user.

Seeing is believing so try this one for size. Open http://www.imdb.com/ in Firefox [duh], right click on the input box where you type in your search words and select Add a Keyword for this Search.... I'm not sure which version of Firefox you need for this, but I'm on 1.5.0.2. You will see a dialog box that looks like this:

I have filled it in already, you can copy mine if you like. Now, in your location bar, type m paul walker and hit Enter.

See what happens now? You search imdb for the term paul walker just by typing m searchword in the location bar. What you've set up here is essentially a bookmark, with a keyword. The keyword is m, what you type in to run a search. It could just as well have been imdb or moviedatabasesearch, then again m is shorter, no?

Needless[?] to say, this isn't limited to imdb.com, you can use this function to create a bookmark for every search box anywhere and set up short keywords to run searches more conveniently. I didn't demo this with google because Firefox already has the google search integrated, but I think this is actually a nicer way to google than using the google input box.