Gordon is a pre-apocalytic American idealist who had become hardened by many years of post-apocalytic surviving on his own. The story really begins as he stumbles upon an old postman's uniform. From there on, he is somehow compelled to change the state of bleakness that characterizes the formerly great United States of America.

I figured that Gordon would find ways to inspire people he met in the story to hope for a better life. That was pretty clear from the beginning of the story. What I hadn't figured on was the ample amount of feminist ideals in this story. It's not that that's a bad thing - it's just that I never expected a male author to produce such thoughts. That was a big surprise.

Without this spark of feminism, the story would have been completely male-dominated. Although the main character is Gordon, it is nice to see some strong female characters as well. I would have expected feminist ideals from authors like Ursula LeGuin and Marion Zimmer Bradley, but this, coming from a male writer, made the story even better. I know that the focus is supposed to be on one man's ordeal to bring hope to the masses, but to me, the feminist aspect of the story made up a large part of what this story is about as well.

Cutlass is a cross-platform encrypted, peer-to-peer, voice, text, and file transmission application, suitable for use by the broad public. I think Cutlass has a lot of potential to be very useful to the masses. The project page is here, if you want to download and try it out.

I'm looking forward to seeing Cutlass grow, and to being a blogger for the Cutlass site.

Other things that have been occuring with increasing frequency are solicitations from tea vendors to send me free samples to review. One of the first vendors to do this was MySips Tea Company, which sells organic rooibos and yerba mate teas. I remember being a bit surprised by their email. Since unbiased reviews are of utmost importance to me, I politely declined their offer. I was worried that I would feel obliged to rate free samples more highly. So, I told MySips that I would buy their tea and review it instead.

More recently, I received a package from Adagio Teas. Apparently, they found my reviews of their teas, and sent me some samples, along with a ingenuiTEA teapot. Since I was already a customer of theirs, they had my address. Because of my previous actions with regards to accepting free samples, this puts me in a bit of an interesting quandary.

I quite like Adagio Teas. They have impressed me in several areas. I like how everything they sell is available in sample sizes packaged in nice tin canisters. You really could make a nice collection of those tea canisters. I was also pleased to see that Adagio is very Internet marketing savvy. This manifested itself from the way their spiffy website is designed, to the ease with finding teas on their site, to the way they utilize Google PageRank technology to determine rewards for their reviewers.

For those who don't know about Google PageRank, it is a quantitative scaling system to tell whether a particular site is 'popular' or not. The more people who link to a site, the more 'popular' it is. If you write reviews for Adagio Teas, and your link to their teas are on sites that have high Google PageRank numbers, then your rewards are given according to those Google PageRank numbers. Adagio is the only vendor I have seen so far that utilizes Google PageRank for rewards.

My reviews of Adagio's teas have been varied. There have been great reviews, and not so good reviews. Overall, I like their teas, even if some of their infusions were more successful than others. I found their rewards program a while ago, but decided not to submit my reviews because I was worried about the implications of getting free samples.

My main concern in this post isn't about whether I like certain teas, though. What I've been thinking about lately is how I will rate free samples in such a way that the integrity of my reviews are not compromised for my readers. That is really the most important issue for me, especially in light of the recent events surrounding Creative Commons and BzzAgent's recently terminated partnership.

Supporters of Creative Commons were dismayed to see an organization they truly believed in forming a partnership with a company that rewards its 'agents/reviewers' on a 'spread the buzz' basis. To the supporters of Creative Commons, this somehow cheapened what they believed in. I think that if Creative Commons was a vendor, the partnership with BzzAgent would have earned much less consternation. But this train of events emphasized the importance of full-disclosure to me.

In my experience as a reader of other reviews, there are some other interesting review models to note. If you're a fan of Japanese animation like I am, you've probably heard of Anime on DVD. Chris Beveridge, the founder of Anime on DVD, gets free anime DVDs all the time from vendors. Sometimes, he even gets DVDs prior to their official release dates. I like that Chris never keeps those free DVDs. Instead, he has contests on his site for readers to participate in, where the prizes are the free DVDs. What really impresses me is that Chris then goes out and buys the DVD, paying out of his own pocket. I can only imagine how many DVDs he has personally bought. As a reader of Anime on DVD, I feel that I can trust Chris' ratings on DVDs because he has no vested interest in being biased towards any particular vendor.

Another site that I frequent is Tom's Hardware. Tom's gets computer hardware samples from just about every hardware vendor. The site is so popular that vendors are only too happy to keep sending the latest and greatest in hopes of getting widespread exposure. The reviews are honest because hardware benchmarking is highly objective. We readers want to know how many millions of instructions per second a chip can process, for instance. Those numbers have to be reproducible by other testers. I don't know if Tom's keeps their hardware samples or not, but I really don't care, as long as the hardware performance benchmarks are not faked.

Clearly, neither Anime on DVD or Tom's review models will work for my tea reviews. I cannot just send tea samples to people I don't know. If something were to happen to the tea to make the person ill, I could be sued over that. I know that just sounded really paranoid, but in this day and age, it seems like one can never be too careful, sadly. Unlike hardware performance benchmarking, tea review cannot be quantified quite the same way, obviously. I personally dislike lapsang souchongs, but someone else might really like it.

I thought about wine reviews. After all, like tea, wine is a consumable, and the ratings are on a similar scale of subjectivity. Unfortunately, I came across some shockingly unsavory sentiments about the wine industry. Recently, NPR broadcasted an interview with the director of Mondovino.

Mondovino is a documentary about the wine industry. The director noted that there are a small group of well-known wine reviewers who are basically responsible for the generalization of wines. Wine makers are so eager to garner good reviews from these few wine reviewers that they are hiring wine consultants to help. These wine consultants help the wine maker tailor the taste of their wines to please the palate of specific reviewers.

This mass generalization is troubling because unique characteristics of wines based on their origin are being lost. I think this is unfortunate. If I were a wine enthusiast, which I don't claim to be, I would want to enjoy the difference between an Austrailian shiraz and an Italian shiraz. Wouldn't you? Instead we're all going to 'enjoy' shiraz a la SomeWineReviewer. It is hard to take reviewers seriously when they accept expensive vacations paid for by the wine vendors.

I've gotten off the track a bit, but my point was that I don't want what's happening to the wine industry to happen to tea. Oolongs from Taiwan taste different from oolongs harvested in China. It should stay that way. I think a lot can be learned about a certain culture and its people by the way the tea is grown and processed. Those are good things not to lose sight of.

Since there's no other review model I found satisfactory for my tea review purposes, I'm going to create one of my own. Seeing as how I've already inadvertantly received free tea samples, I will allow those now. However, my reviews of free samples will contain a 'full-disclosure' note linking to this page. I intend to be just as unbiased with free samples as I am with personally purchased samples. I may even give some samples away to personal friends and order the same tea from the vendor to review. This will likely not be doable all the time because tea is harvested seasonally, and the supplies can sometimes sell out for the season. But readers should be rest-assured that I will fully disclose whether I ended up buying the tea separately or not.

As always, I do not intend to make a living off of reviewing teas. I already have a great job where I get to work with computers every day AND get paid to do that. I'm really just an engineer who enjoys drinking tea and sharing my thoughts about the ones I come across. Hopefully, I can contribute to making tea drinking more popular in the US.

One joke that goes around among my parent's circle of friends is that their Asian physicians would advise against going out to dim sum. But guess who we'd all see at the dim sum places when we did go? Yup, you guessed it. The culture of sharing meals with good friends is widespread. Dim sum is a way of eating in many Asian countries. Think of it like Spanish tapas, in terms of enjoying tasty food with good company.

Dim sum may be unhealthy, but I think it is no more unhealthy than fast food. It just needs to be eaten in moderation. By the way, I would never soak dim sum in hot water to remove oils. It would definitely ruin the taste. I think people who soak their dim sum in water should just stay home and eat salad.

Rooibos has a slightly buttery flavor to it, and when vanilla is added to rooibos, the result is very dessert-like. I reviewed Celestial Seasoning's Madagascar Vanilla Red Rooibos Tea earlier. This is the same infusion as Celestial Seasonings' Vanilla Rooibos, but I like Teavana's better. Somehow, the taste of vanilla feels less artificial in Teavana's blend. I've also tried other scented rooibos from Teavana, but not liked it as much as vanilla-scented rooibos. As far as perfection goes, this infusion is pretty close to it.

On the other hand, I did take some time last fall to plant daffodils and tulips outside my house. Despite my black thumbs and best efforts, they are actually alive and blooming. That, in itself is much more than I ever expected, so I'm happy. Historically, I've had little success with growing plants. My best experience (sort of) was with a geranium plant that came in a can.

How does this work, you wonder? Well, you pop the lid off the can, water the medium inside, put the can in a sunny window, and in weeks, a green shoot appears. Very easy. So, when the shoots appeared, I eagerly anticipated a blooming geranium in no time.

That is, until I came home from work one day, and noticed that there's no shoot left in the can. This is something that was there in the morning, and about 2 inches tall. Now, there's not even 2 millimeters left of it. However, one of my cats had a very satisfied look on his face. Oops. Hope he enjoyed that geranium salad.

Travel plans are starting to heat up. I will be in Chicago early May for my cousin's wedding. Then, in June, I will be travelling to Montreal along with fellow Syn Ack Labs folks Todd MacDermid and Jack Lloyd. We will be attending and speaking at RECON 2005. Todd and Jack will talk about CUTLASS, and I'm looking forward to talking about honeyclients. I've never been to Montreal, and hear that it's a fun place.

There's a table that we've set up for Syn Ack Labs t-shirts and stickers, so stop by if you're in Cleveland! There's also a pizza party we're throwing today after Froggy and Tyger's keynote. So, stop by for free pizza if you're in the area.

I was at GFIRST in Orlando from Monday to Friday of this week as well. I think speaking at two conferences in a row if rough, especially if the speaking topics are entirely different from one another. There was a lot of activities sponsored at GFIRST by various corporations, including an excursion to Sea World. I can't say that I would want to ever go to Sea World again. I saw the Shamu Rocks America show, and was disappointed that it was only 20 minutes long.

Well, it was really 30 minutes, but 10 minutes of the 'Shamu show' was padded out by insulting the audience members. Yes, I meant that. There were cameras installed all over the Shamu seating area. For 10 minutes they played these cheesy wedding songs like 'Y.M.C.A.' and panned the camera on just about everyone in the audience. That would have been OK, but they took the liberty of adding bubbles over people's heads and saying what I thought were rude things. For example, the camera panned on a bald guy, followed by a bubble that says 'Bald Is Beautiful'.

I mean, who needs that? There was another panned scene of a guy's fat gut. Oh, by the way, this is all broadcasting on a very large screen in front of the audience so everyone can laugh at the victim's expense. I thought it was mean-spirited. When Shamu splashed water on the audience, the camera of course zoomed in on the kid that was crying as he was being deluged with water. I didn't go to the stupid show to see that, and I definitely would not recommend it to anyone else either. Sea World sucks, big time. I'll just stick to Disney World, thank you.

... you can see that in the US people almost exclusively buy branded teas... and are willing to pay good prices for few tea leaves.

That's an interesting observation, but speaking from experience as someone who lives in the US, I can say that Stephane's observation is only partially true. Sure, Americans buy mostly branded teas. By 'branded' I'm assuming Stephane means tea that's distributed by larger franchises. However, I think the number of people 'willing to pay good prices for a few tea leaves' is not that high. Let me go into more details on both of those observations...

Undoubtably, coffee is much more popular than tea in the US. Just go into a Starbucks, and you'll see that the ratio of folks ordering coffee over tea is quite high. It almost seems like tea is supplied as an afterthought at more coffeehouses. Don't even get me started about teahouses - there are not nearly enough of them.

Now, knowing what I said in the previous paragraph, you can see why there are almost no 'unbranded' teas being sold. How could someone hope to open a mom-and-pop tea shop selling generic teas around here and do a brisk business when many folks who think of drinking tea will just go to Starbucks? I'll bet in Taiwan, tea shops are plentiful. The last time I was in Taiwan, I didn't check for tea shops, so don't quote me on that.

I think many folks in the US have rather low expectations for tea. That is to say, tea connoisseurs are rare. Here, I routinely see folks order their 'venti, skim, caramel mocha with no whipped cream', but couldn't tell you the difference between black and green tea. Whereas coffee is more of a way of life here, tea is a cyclic fad. 'Quick! Buy some tea, I hear it has antioxidants!'

I think I only know a few people who are as interested in drinking tea as I am. These are people who like tea for its own sake and care very little about its health benefits. It's a lot of fun to talk to these friends about tea. These are also the only people I know who are willing to drop some dough on good tea. So, going back to Stephane's obsrvation about people in the US spending serious money on tea: I wish that was true, but it's not. If it was true, then perhaps we'll see more generic family-run tea shops popping up to compete with the larger distributors.

This is because SWG's environment rendering isn't as rich. For example, when running through Tatooine, the scenery was so ho-hum at times. Except for the occasional tumbleweed that pops up, I would sometimes see no creatures or buildings at all. The WoW environment is richly rendered. There's almost always some sort of creature camp or another off to the side of the main roads. There's also mining and herbalism things to gather as well. Granted, I wish that different items would be available depending on which city I'm in. For example, there should be different recipes in different cities, which would give me something to look forward to. There's just too much of the same items. I was pretty excited when a new area yielded new fish while fishing yesterday.

Oh the other hand, I thought SWG was far better at preventing leakage of game environment objects into eBay. Really, the fact that there are people who sell items from MMORPGs to others is not new. It's especially notable in EverQuest, so I've heard. However, I'm a big proponent of keeping gaming objects purely in the gaming world, and this 'outside trading' irks me to some degree.

I'm noting this because I heard that there are players who 'farm' high level areas in WoW, and make a lot of game currency in the form of gold pieces. They then turn around and sell those virtual gold pieces on eBay to other players that cannot wait to make their own living in the game. I've heard that most of the offenders who sell the gold pieces are based out of the People's Republic of China.

There are a couple of things I think that can be done to prevent this from happening. The servers are linked to the origin of the game. If you buy the game from the US, you will only be able to link to a US server. So, the answer isn't to separate the servers by country - that's already happening. What players are actually doing is buying copies of the game from say, the US, and logging into a US server to 'farm' for lucrative objects. There's probably a way for Blizzard to monitor and correlate actions of the players such that those people can be caught. For example, if some number of players team up constantly in a high level area, use macros all the time, then sell in the auction house, then a flag might be raised. However, I think this correlation would be a non-trivial task.

Another thing that might help remedy the situation is if prices were not so ludicrous in WoW. For example, buying a mount requires 80 gold. This is assuming that the player has already reached level 40 proficiency. First of all, reaching level 40 isn't that easy. It'll probably take me about two months to reach level 40, playing several nights a week, and at least one weekend day. I'm almost level 20 in the game now, with the mage, and still only have 5 gold pieces. As you can see, it will be a looong time before I get 80 gold pieces. So, I think 80 gold pieces for a mount is completely ridiculous.

To be fair, Blizzard has actually revoked accounts of those who are suspected to be 'farming' high paying areas in the game. Players who get quests to kill certain creatures would show up in the area and never have the chance because of these people who would squat there constantly. There were enough complaints that Blizzard decided to do something. But, who knows if the owners of the revoked accounts can just go buy another copy of the game?

Anyhow, that's my $0.02 for WoW so far. Great game, but needs some trimming.

On the other hand, I'm also preparing to give talks at two conferences in early April, so it's not all fun and games all the time. Both conferences are in early April, and are back-to-back. Whew! I will be presenting on Rider Worms and Honeyclients at GFIRST, and CUTLASS at NotACon. It'll be great to talk to other folks at the conferences. I'm looking forward to being there. If you're going to be at those conferences, give me a shout.