This morning, I awoke to a white blur outside my bedroom window. As I put on my glasses, the white came into focus and I could see that snow was clinging to every surface in sight.

The heavy, wet snow of an early spring storm was stacked on every branch and twig; all of the horizontal surfaces had 6 inches of the sticky stuff on it. This happens only a few different times each year and it's always truly beautiful to behold.

Unfortunately, most of the time when I am greeted by this sight out the window, I'm getting ready to go to work or otherwise obligated to move on with my day. By the time my obligations are fulfilled on those days, the snow has melted in the spring sun and the opportunity to enjoy the scenery is gone.

This morning, on the other hand, was a weekend.

I showered, threw on my hat, coat and boots and grabbed my camera for a trip to the closest park: Lake Palmer. It's a combination of forest and wetlands that is just 5 or so minutes from my house.

This being Minnesota and above freezing, I wasn't alone in enjoying the park. However, all of that snow muffled all sound but my own breathing and the wet crunch of snow under my boots. That deep quiet emphasized just how noisy and chaotic life has been for the last 3-4 months.

I wandered for about a half hour, taking pictures as I followed the trails, leaving them whenever I saw something interesting.

The cattails were particularly interesting, with ice and snow layered over the exploded fluff of the tips of the plant.

That time alone with my thoughts, taking pictures of the natural beauty surrounding me was some of the best time In recent memory and a great way to enjoy the warm weather.

The photo highlights from that session are here.

Photo: Alexia

While June is nearly over, it's still worth noting that June is National Iced Tea Month. I didn't know that a few weeks ago when I started my quest for better iced tea (or I would have written this up sooner).

Personally, my quest started from a different set of motivations.

• I like tea, but 200°F beverages and 90°F temperatures don't really mix well.
• I enjoy a good meal, but can't stand wine and don't drink alcohol. The complexities in fine tea offer the possibilities of matching high quality tea to food in the same ways that wine usually is matched. In short, I think it can offer a way to have a more sophisticated beverage with my meals than soda, water or milk while staying away from alcohol.
• Nearly every iced tea "recipe" I find pretty much disqualifies itself from contributing to the conversation by using Lipton tea bags as their gold standard against which "good" iced tea should be measured. Given that fans of coffee don't hold Folgers up as a benchmark, or $2 wine or McDonald's as the pinnacle of hamburger cuisine, the pulverized bits of tea that are in Lipton bags are the starting point, not the end.

So, I've started on a journey to come up with better iced teas for myself. Like I said, I started with the standard "Lipton recipe" and process, which goes something like this:

1. Boil 4 cups of water.
2. Put a couple of tea bags into it and let them brew for about twice as long as "normal".
3. Pour that into a 2 quart pitcher.
4. Fill the pitcher with ice.
5. Pour into glass with ice.

Sweet tea adds anywhere from 1/2 to a cup of sugar to step 3. I generally do like my tea sweetened, but often, the sugar is pumped too high because the tea is really astringent and needs the sweetening in order to smooth over that flavor.

I dropped into my local tea shop and they actually had a little flyer making recommendations of varieties that make good iced tea. Taking that as a good starting point, I bought half a dozen varieties, some from the list and some I just wanted to try and have been drinking the resulting teas over the last couple of weeks. I'll be buying more from the list as I get through the first batch.

I bought:

• Hunan Black
• Formosa Choicest Oolong (which I drink regularly as a hot tea)
• Mauritius Black, which has a lovely vanilla note to it.
• China Black Special, which might be a bit too smoky for me.
• Big Red Robe Oolong
• Longevity Oolong

Along with messing with the starting teas, I've been trying varying levels of sugar and using other sweeteners as well. It's clear that some teas need far less sweetening, even to taste like "sweet tea", like the Mauritius, for which 3/4 cup was so overly sweet it made me want to gag. It was much better when I dialed the sugar way back.

The downside to iced tea as wine substitute is that iced tea doesn't keep very well. A day or so later, it's pretty nasty, but you can make a fresh pitcher really quickly, so I don't have a problem with that. The fact that this is true when iced tea is made from scratch, is why bottled iced tea kind of creeps me out. Exactly what stabilizing chemicals and preservatives are necessary to keep it in exactly the same state for months on end?

At any rate, I know that there are a lot of people out there who either stay away from alcohol for ethical reasons, personal reasons, or just for taste reasons, but really want to have a nice drink with their meals. Between Seven Cups, The Tea Source and Adagio Teas alone, there are hundreds of different varieties worth trying out as part of my quest. From deep earthy puerh's to light white teas, there's surely as much rich complexity there as there is in wine and iced tea can be elevated from just another nozzle on the soda fountain to a beverage suitable as part of any gourmet meal.

I believe that taxpayer-funded public education, as implemented by the State of Minnesota (probably most other states too) is completely broken. I am not saying that teachers are broken. Quite the opposite. Here's a little experiment that I think would prove it.

1. Take the current Minnesota per pupil expenditure of $8440 per year.
2. Take 25 randomly selected students from *any* district in the state at any one grade level.
3. Give the $211,000 that those 25 students currently generate for the public education industry in this state to any fully qualified teacher.
4. Ask that teacher to take care of the same things for those 25 students that the money currently takes care of: transportation, teaching the subject matter, providing a classroom, providing access to lunch (remember most schools are charging for lunch), etc.
5. Measure the results

Does anyone really believe that any genuinely qualified teacher (no choosing the poster child for under achievement here) couldn't take 2 HUNDRED THOUSAND dollars and not only rent space to teach the kids in, transport the kids, ensure they're taught to at least the standards currently in place, not just provide access to food, but feed them AND still make more money than they currently do under the existing system?

If so, PLEASE don't try to claim that you think highly of teachers. The overhead in the way we structure education is absurd.

A couple of days ago, Garrick asked a good question that I've wondered about myself: where can you find downloadable music from the upper midwest? I like finding new music and always get an extra bit of warm fuzzy when the artist is from Minnesota or nearby.

While the question raised some ideas about future projects, I did suggest CD Baby's state-specific listings: Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, South Dakota, etc. While the interface that they provide isn't great, it does underscore just how much great music is out there from EVERY area of the world.

CD Baby is a great idea. Make a place for artists to sell their CD's without having to go through labels. Many of the discs are way cheaper than the $15-18 in most stores and I've bought a couple for well under the $10 that iTunes charges as well. Of course, since pretty much anyone can sell a CD there, pretty much anyone *does*, which makes the preview tracks a good idea (and just plain a good source of MP3's).

The tracks are all individual or by M3U playlist for streaming. The problem is that my searching for music is pretty much completely separated from my evaluation of it. I tend to find a list of artists/albums/tracks I might like, download them and listen to them later. I pretty much NEVER listen to the potentially interesting music when I find it.

All of that meant that to get the most out of the CD Baby sample tracks, I wanted a quick way to queue up the downloading of the tracks on a playlist. First, note that the playlist URL for an album changes (daily it looks like), so this is pretty much about downloading in the background while you're browsing the catalog, not trying to spider their entire site. What I am doing works today, but could always change.

At any rate, with a command prompt open (Linux, Windows or Mac doesn't matter) and a copy of wget on your system path, you can make quick work of grabbing the contents of a playlist.

See, an M3U playlist is pretty simple, coming down to pretty much a text file of URL's to MP3 files. That just happens to be the exact thing wget is made to handle. So, the general "workflow" works like this:

1. Find an album you like.
2. Right click on the "Play All Songs" link above the track list and copy the link address.
3. Go to the command prompt and type "wget" followed by a space and then the URL. On Linux, it can be pasted by CTRL+SHIFT+V. Hit ENTER.
4. Note the filename of the M3U that it downloads.
5. Run "wget -i playlistname.m3u" and let it run.

It will then download them all one at a time. It all works fairly well. I've got them all downloading to a specific directory called, simply enough "cdbaby". I'm keeping them all under there so that I know where to go to buy the albums I like. However, I do want them organized by artist and album. It's just how I roll.

Fortunately, I wrote code to move and rename MP3's by ID3 tag a while back. Add the folder to iTunes and make another smart playlist and I can evaluate more music easily. And, with as much as I've been working the last couple of weeks, more music is a really good thing.

On Saturday, I went to the 2007 edition of Minnebar. There have been Barcamp events all over the world. What's impressive about this year's Minnebar is that it was the 2nd biggest one EVER after Bangalore. Given that this isn't San Francisco or Seattle, getting the kind of turnout they did is pretty substantial.

I'd personally like to see a conference that's more on the Open Space model. There were rooms for and a whiteboard to organize ad hoc sessions, but the sessions were pretty much all scheduled and prepared in advance. The best session I attended was Garrick's on Designing for Use. *That* session was pretty much an open session to discuss problems people were having and try to find solutions. More sessions like that one would have been great.

After reading the Open Space book, I was really amped to want to do a technology conference on that model. Lots of people told me that what I wanted was to go to a BarCamp. After attending this one, I want to go to next year's, but this definitely wasn't what's described in the book. It was good, but not Open Space. I still want to see something on that model as I think it could be really engaging.

Of course, it looks like (to me) that both models (BarCamp and OpenSpace) have scalability issues as they pass that 200-300 person size. They can probably be overcome, but would require deliberate action.

At any rate, I ran a session myself on RESTful Web Development for about an hour. Exold posted his notes including a kind comment about my presentation/session:

A good session, and the first time that what REST really is has stuck. This might’ve been due to the use of paper and Sharpie for diagramming, rather than the paradoxically underdone yet overdone PowerPoint one usually sees.

Given that the session was during the last time slot of the day, I wasn't feeling 100% and it was something like 85°F in there, I didn't really feel like I was anywhere near the top of my game. I'm glad someone got something good out of it. I decided to ditch the whole Powerpoint approach and go with what works well for me: markers on the wall. I would have preferred a markerboard instead of paper tacked to the wall (ran out of space before we were done), but it apparently went OK.

I did do some recording of sessions, including mine. However, I haven't pulled them off of the recorder yet. I'll post a comment on this post when I do.