Coffee in Atlanta

[A report, after four days of intensive investigation, punctuated here and there by "apartment-hunting."]

1. You can buy Blue Bottle beans at Star Provisions on Howell Mill Road. When I saw the Bella Donovan I nearly wept with relief.

2. Steady Hand on North Decatur (right by the Fox Center!) brews Intelligentia, which is respectable. I don't know what their funky apparatus is, but it produces a clean brew that does a good job of revealing the character of the bean.

3. Octane on Marietta brews Counter Culture, and I was favorably impressed; it is, like the coffee from Steady Hand, nuanced third-wave stuff. But they brew it in a French press, apparently with a finer grind than is really appropriate for a press, and the result is a rather muddy brew even after you've let it settle. Good coffee, but advantage goes to Steady Hand for texture.

4. I want to like the local roaster, Batdorf and Bronson, and they seem, you know, perfectly fine. But so far I'm not thrilled by it or ready to adopt it as my new local coffee. Aurora and the Bakeshop brew it and dispense it in an air pot—which is to say, it's morally okay to put this coffee in an air pot. This is, I would say, perfectly acceptable coffee, but I wouldn't go out of my way for it.

5. Urban Grind's coffee, I am sorry to say, is a disappointment.

So, like, I'm in Atlanta?

Another question about G+ integration with other Google products: when will I be able to share a GDoc with a circle?

And: when that happens, will Google's total infiltration of the universe be scary/ier?

And: have cats weighed in on the issue?

(Duh.)

G+, briefly

I'm trying out Google Plus, because I'm a sucker like that, and also because Google already owns most of my life, so what's the loss? (Copies of my diss on GDocs, etc.)

Apart from a brief exploration of Facebook (which is ridiculous), I have hitherto confined my internet activities to the public: a blog with my name on it, a Twitter account with my name on it. This seems to me to be right and just. (Well, I am pseudonymous on one other social network that will remain nameless but which is by far the best designed and most useful social network I have ever seen.)

G+ offers the same temptations as Facebook: the walled garden, the ability to form little clubs. That's both the good news and the bad news, I guess.

I've heard it said (a lot) that big search is dying (because spammers and similar are so good at SEO) and social search is the future. That strikes me as likely. This changes the nature of the "publicness" that I've tried to maintain in my web presence, but I'm not sure how just yet.

It occurs to me that there may be a day when G+ has nicer integration with Blogger blogs than just the ugly "+1" button, since both are Google properties. (The social network that shall go nameless has fairly nontrivial integration with blogs.) Blogs are said to be an old new medium, but I still like them. They're a damn good place to put text.

A note on commentary through taxonomy:

One thing I love about Twitter that G+ doesn't have is hashtags. This is a feature of its nonpublicness. Tagging is one of the best things about the web; commentary through taxonomy has become standard, and this is a curious and lovely thing. So far you can't really do it with G+. But this is the internet, so I'm sure people will eventually find a way.

Sweet FSM. I packed one (1) box of books. It barely made a dent in my shelves, and I nearly died schlepping it down to the Elmwood post office.

This is going to be a trial.