Get Some Rest, Sleepyheads

January 28, 2013 by Patrick LaForge

Last week, a 20-something on my staff said 6 hours of sleep a night was enough. I was skeptical. I used to sleep 9 or 10 hours a night in my 20s and 30s.

Those nights are gone. In the last few years, my sleep has been disrupted by breathing problems related to apnea. Sleeping with a CPAP breathing mask has helped, but I am still lucky to get 7 hours of uninterrupted rest. Lately, I have been using a blue light lamp, which seems to increase my alertness and improve my mood in the winter darkness. I also monitor my sleep with an app.

Experimenting With Storify on Squarespace

December 03, 2012 by Patrick LaForge

Update: October 2024.

A note for posterity. Storify, like so many social media experiments back in the 2010s, died an abrupt death, taking about a dozen posts on this blog with it. The posts consisted of embedded tweets from staffers at The Times, using the @nytimes newsroom staff list on Twitter. from the heyday of Twitter, before Elon Musk came at the platform with a wrecking ball and even changed the name. I’m leaving this stub for posterity but deleting the blank posts that were part of this blogging experiment.

The Public Editor Joins the Cocktail Party

March 13, 2011 by Patrick LaForge in Paper & Ink, Social Media

Arthur S. Brisbane, the public editor of The New York Times, turned his attention this week to the newsroom's use of Twitter. He quoted from an e-mail interview with me, which I am posting in full here, with a few tweaks and links. The Public Editor: I’m working on a column about how Times staffers use Twitter: the journalistic benefits, the marketing benefits and any other benefits – as well as the costs, whatever they might be. I am, I confess, a newcomer to using Twitter and wonder whether it is a boon or a waste of time.

A Ride to Kaffe 1668 for Los Volcanes

July 18, 2010 by Patrick LaForge in Coffee!, New York, Social Media

One July weekend, I had the opportunity to combine two of my favorite activities -- riding my bike through Manhattan and visiting new coffee shops. My family was traveling elsewhere, and New York had not yet fallen into the drippy hot torpor that has marked recent days. I rode down the west side a bit, diverted to to the Hudson River trail, then passed through TriBeCa, Chinatown, SoHo and my old East Village stomping grounds before chugging up the East Side -- a loop of sorts.

Coffee, Hot and Cold

June 12, 2010 by Patrick LaForge in Coffee!, New York

This is a quickie coffee post, dashed off while watching the U.S.-England World Cup match and discussing the propriety of promiscuously using "tweet" in news articles. First, a word about B. Koffie's Yirgacheffe and Kenya French Mission offerings. Kudos to La Columbe, the roaster. I sampled the latter and refilled my Mason jar with the former on a May 29 visit. Both were tasty and in line with the descriptions on the boards.

First Week With the Apple iPad

April 11, 2010 by Patrick LaForge in iPhone Apps, Social Media

The world probably doesn't really need another iPad review, does it?

There's a glut out of them out there.

And I'm not a tech reviewer. I'm a gadget nut, so feel free to discount my enthusiasm by the appropriate percentage. After all, I did pre-order this thing sight unseen so it could be delivered on Day One.

So this post will be impressionistic, just some notes on my first week with the device.

A Lost Twitter List, Beans From Kenya

March 06, 2010 by Patrick LaForge in Coffee!, New York

Before I get to the latest installment of my endless coffee quest, I must mourn the end of my brief reign as a Twitter list maven. At the start of this week, I made the mistake of using the latest crashy build of Firefox while playing around on the Tlists site with my lists.

Fazenda Sertaozinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil!

January 30, 2010 by Patrick LaForge in Coffee!, New York

I've tried a few of the winter selections at Café Grumpy -- the El Salvadoran, the Rwandan, and of course the only espresso standby Heartbreaker -- and they were all good, but I can't really recall with any clarity their individual qualities. Let's pronounce them good and move on. But with the start of my kid's second semester drawing me back down into the Chelsea neighborhood more regularly, I picked up this Grumpy roast with the Tolkienesque name, and it's getting me through the dark days.

Catching Up on Coffee: Helsar de Zarcero

December 20, 2009 by Patrick LaForge in Coffee!

I was too busy for blogging these many weeks, but I was drinking coffee, and so my record here will have a gap. There was a roast from Verve that was quite tasty but is no longer available, and I made it through a couple of rough weeks with the delicious Peet's Holiday Blend, which my wife carried back from Los Angeles. She was spending some time there with her mother, who was ill but recovering, Then Nancy died unexpectedly from a stroke just before Thanksgiving. With that and all the other troubles this year, 2009 will not go down in our memory as a good year.

A Return to Guatemala via Stumptown

October 11, 2009 by Patrick LaForge in Coffee!, New York

I've enjoyed a number of Guatemalan coffees -- the Finca La Folie from Ritual Roasters, Itzamna from Intelligentsia, the Nimac Kapeh and the Soma blend from Barismo -- so I picked up these beans on another side trip to Stumptown's Manhattan location at the Ace Hotel in the 20s. As always, the service was fast and pleasant, and I received a complimentary coffee because I was buying beans. (I was also playing around with Foursquare and its iPhone app, and discovered that there's a fierce battle to become "mayor" of this location.)

An Opinion About Blue Batak

September 28, 2009 by Patrick LaForge in Blogging, Coffee!, Social Media

It is a little known fact that coffee improves your objectivity as a journalist. O.K., I'm kidding. I don't believe in "objectivity" and usually avoid the word. It sounds like an impossible God-like standard. Most people who use that term are setting up a straw man. I prefer terms like balance, neutrality, fairness. And conventional newspaper journalism can certainly reach conclusions, so long as they are supported by evidence, and qualified.

A Side Trip to Stumptown, Manhattan

September 12, 2009 by Patrick LaForge in New York, Coffee!

People I know who have spent time in the Portland area have raved about Stumptown Coffee for years. They roast the beans right in the store! Nothing on the East Coast compares! So after the second-day-of-school parents' breakfast on Friday, my wife and I tagged along through the rain when another parent suggested we walk over to the new Stumptown outlet in the Ace Hotel in an area that some people are trying to call SoMa (for "South of Macy's") in the high 20s off Broadway. The shop was nicely appointed, with a classic feel, more upscale than your average grungy coffee shop. The baristas wore neckties and jaunty hipster hats (which were mocked by some on Twitter when I posted a quick slideshow on Posterous).

Third-Party iPhone Apps I Actually Still Use

September 09, 2009 by Patrick LaForge in New York, iPhone Apps, Blogging, Moving Images, Social Media

More often than I care to recall, I have impulsively downloaded a fancy new iPhone application, only to have it languish on my phone. That was the inspiration for the first "list of iPhone apps I actually use" last year, after the iTunes store started selling third-party applications. Since then, the number of new applications has grown rapidly. Now there's a cottage industry of lists, blogs and podcasts devoted to reviewing applications.

Grown Near a Glacier in Kenya

September 06, 2009 by Patrick LaForge in Coffee!, New York

I write this during a long Labor Day weekend, as we're trying to grab the last few strands of summer: A few last bike rides, wrapping up some reading, paying a visit to the Spa Castle in Queens, and more. This has not been the greatest couple of months. The economy is still in turmoil, of course, and there's a lot of fear and uncertainty in the news business. At home, we have been coping with some illnesses in my wife's extended family. So it has not always been easy to focus on coffee, though my blog quest can be a welcome distraction. This coffee in particular came and went before I had a chance to fully appreciate it. I bought it at the same time as the Koke from Barismo and Verve's El Balamo-Quetzaltepec from El Salvador.

Taxi Fire, With PicPosterous

September 03, 2009 by Patrick LaForge in Blogging, iPhone Apps, Social Media

I tried out the new PicPosterous iPhone app today to take some pictures of the wreckage from a taxi fire in front of Maison restaurant in Midtown, at 53rd and 7th. The fire was put out pretty quickly. Nobody was hurt. Afterward, tourists were standing around snapping pictures of each other in front of the wreck.

Exit the Kindle, in a Splash of E-Ink

August 09, 2009 by Patrick LaForge in Blogging, iPhone Apps, Paper & Ink, Social Media

Well, this is one cost of early technology adoption. I bought an original Kindle in April 2008, and it has served me well, so I can't complain too much. Recently, I noticed a sort of smudge developing in the upper left corner of the screen, even when the machine was turned off. There were also slight streaks of white lines going vertically down the screen, with a washed-out appearance at the top. I could still read books, but it was sort of annoying. I decided to see if Amazon tech support could offer any advice.

Los Inmortales in a Bag

June 20, 2009 by Patrick LaForge in Coffee!, New York

It has been a week for obsessions, from Twitter to a new addiction, Plants vs. Zombies. The first was the subject of a two-day conference where I was a panelist, even as social media played a role in the Iranian election unrest. The other is the latest computer game that has consumed too much time of the 9-year-old and, um, others, in our household. It is amusing and addictive. If you play it you will never look at mushrooms or vegetable gardening in quite the same way again.

Welcome, Twitter Users

May 31, 2009 by Patrick LaForge in Social Media

It is likely that you arrived at this welcome page by clicking the link on my Twitter profile. This post is my primitive method for tracking traffic from Twitter.

From the Thunguri Auction Lot in Kenya

March 08, 2009 by Patrick LaForge in Blogging, Coffee!

Ah, the signs of spring -- Turbotax, Daylight Saving Time and warmer weather. What better time to jump-start a moribund blog? I've been kicking around some ideas for posts. For example, I am really grooving on the new Kindle for iPhone application. It is amazing to be reading a book on one device then have the phone call the same text up to the page where I left off. And the updated New York Times iPhone app is snappier than the original, which had grown slower and frustrating with new phone firmware updates. Now I can get depressing economic news right in my hand in a matter of seconds.