A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit Manic Coffee, the Kensington Market area’s newest coffee house. My guest and I were drawn to this little coffee house after reading in the newspaper that they were offering the award-winning La Esmeralda Special coffee from Panama that day only for $15 a cup. Why such a high price you ask? The coffee trades at approximately $130/ lb, making it one of the most expensive coffees available.

After my guest and I finished our dinners, we headed over to the coffee shop. We walked inside and inquired with the Barrista about having a sample of this legendary coffee. Unfortunately, my guest and I underestimated the popularity of this drink. To obtain a tasting, we were supposed to request to be added to a list (something the newspaper failed to inform us about).

Slightly disappointed and in dire need of an after dinner beverage, we decided to stay at the coffee shop anyway. The owner of the establishment took excellent care of us, giving us each a tasting sampler of 3 different coffees in what he described as tasting sizes. Before each round of samplings, he brought the freshly grounded coffee over for us to smell and discuss. The first round of coffee came, and he told us to enjoy it without any sugar or cream. He told us to take a sip when it’s fresh and hot then take another sip when it cool and to taste the coffee for any differences. The differences were definitely noticeable. The other two rounds came, with each coffee being more complex and rich than the previous one. By the end of the third coffee, I was definitely over-caffeinated as the tasting sizes provided were more than generously sized.

If these ‘ordinary’ coffees tasted so amazing, the Esmeralda coffee must be clearly in its own league. Due to the scarcity of the beans, it looks like we’ll have to wait til 2008 for the next batch. When that time comes, we’ll definitely try to make sure we’re on the list.

This past weekend I had the opportunity to install Leopard on my Mac Mini G4 at home. As I didn’t research any Leopard gotchas, I just popped the installation DVD into the drive and proceeded with the installation. After a little over an hour, the upgrade looked like it completed fine.

I excitedly clicked the reboot button in anticipation of trying out the new OS. Unfortunately, when the machine booted up again, I was presented with a blue screen. The mouse cursor was fully functional but no login screen was present. After much trial and error and research on the Internet, I realized that the culprit was ClearDock. The workaround to the ‘blue screen of death’ is available in the Apple Discussion Forums.

As I did not have many files on my Mac Mini, I simply backed up all my files on to my firewire drive and proceeded to do a fresh install of Leopard. Alternatively, one could boot into OS X in safe mode and uninstall ClearDock manually.

Other than this gotcha, I’ve been reasonably impressed with Leopard. So far, I really like the Spaces, tabbed browsing in Safari 3, and the much faster Spotlight. I’m not completely sold on the redesigned dock but I suspect it may grow on me in time.