Nescafe vs. Grandos Express

During the last few years I seriously decreased my consumption of coffee. I used to drinks several cups a day, every day, with some coke mixed in in between. These days I drink it rarely. And mostly in the office. And mostly during my night shifts. And not more than two cups a night.

And for these last few years my brand of instant coffee was Grandos Express. I don’t even remember when, why and how I switched. But I remember that I used to drink Nescafe and than, at some point, I stopped and switched completely to Grandos Express.

Yesterday I ran out of coffee in the office and remembered about it on my way back to work, when it was late and everything was closed. I stopped by the only open kiosk on my way. They were selling only Nescafe, so I bought myself a small can.

When I made a cup of Nescafe in the office, I immediately realized why I switched to Grandos Express. Jez! Any coffee is better than Nescafe. Seriously! The smell only remotely suggest a weak relation some coffee product. The taste is horrible. And it doesn’t even look like the proper coffee – no froth (is that the right word?) what-so-ever. Yeah, I checked the expiration date and everything – all good.

It’s better to fall asleep. It’s better to drink the junk out of our office coffee machine. But I am not, under any circumstances, drinking another cup of Nescafe. Not even with the gun pointed to my head… Yuck!

Bad morning. Bad!

I just woke up and logged in. News time. I navigated to Bloglines, but it greeted me with “There is a problem with the database. Please try again later”. I thought – “yeah, well, that’s perfect time to read something that I’ve bookmarked a long time ago and never had a chance to come back to”. So I tried to load my Delicious bookmarks. Nope, no chance. I got only “del.icio.us is down for maintenance. we’ll be back in one hour.”…

Oh, my! What’s going on? Who’s next? Slashdot? Google? I rushed to check both of them, but they seem to be OK. Good. I’ll have something to read for the next hour.

On life expectancy

I had a revelation this morning. It was about life expectancy.

In most countries women have higher life expectancy than men. That basically means that women live longer. The reasons may vary. But one of them got stuck in my head like a dream or something:

Women generally don’t drink ten pints of beer every Friday in a heavily smoked pub and then street race their way back home. Like their husbands do.

Purhaps it has something to do with life expectancy. Purhaps it doesn’t. I just liked how it sort of appeared in my head and got stuck there.

Safer driving with podcasts

I made an interesting observation – listening to podcasts makes me drive safer.

In fact, previously, I was driving safer whenever there was a good show on the radio. I was driving slower because I wanted to listen until the end of the show before I’d get to my destination. I’d pay more attention to the road because I were thinking that radio can disturb my focus. My braind would be more active processing the stuff I was hearing.

But since there just isn’t a great choice of radio stations in my area. And since my reciever can get only on decent station – catching a good show was a rare occasion for me. So rare, that I couldn’t notice the pattern in changes of my driving behaviour.

With podcasts though it became obvious. Podcasts are like a personal radio program. I choose exactly what I want to listen to, and thus every show is interesting for me.

I also noticed that I started to use more features of my mobile phone – my podcast listening device. I installed more new software, learned more ways of the old software, etc. But that’s a total other story, isn’t it…