As a gift, the wife bought me Keurig’s Gourmet Single-Cup Home Brewing System. The Special Edition B60 to be more precise. Why did she buy it for me? Well she knew full well I would never even consider buying a coffee maker over $100 on my own. Why would I? My Mr. Coffee Maker for $25 has served me well. Only rich fools would buy themselves such an expensive coffee maker, right?

Well, now that this handsome coffee maker sits in my kitchen…I’ll never go back to my old coffee maker. The machine is always ready to brew me a cup of coffee within one minute since it constantly keeps a couple cups of water steaming hot. All you do is slip in one of these K-Cups filled with coffee (basically coffee grains in a disposable plastic cup), place your cup next to the brewing system, hit the button, and your done. The one touch brewing system allows for three cup sizes, tea cup, coffee cup, and travel mug. The coffee maker doesn’t quite fill up my travel mug, but given the variety of travel mug sizes I can see why it’s not going to fill every single travel mug out there perfectly.

My Keurig included a variety of 18 K-Cups. The coffee was all good, but surprisingly I found that I also liked the K-Cups filled with tea (would that be called a T-Cup?). For the first time in my life, I’m a tea lover. However, I found that it was just as easy to use a regular tea bags to brew my tea with the Keurig than one of the K-Cups. The B60 has the ability to just fill your cup with hot water instantly into a cup allowing for an easy cup of tea or hot chocolate in seconds. I’ve heard some complaints that the coffee coming out of the K-Cups is a little weak. I suppose this is all a matter of taste, but since I don’t drink the darkest coffee out there…it’s perfect for my taste buds.

My Keurig B60 also includes a back-lit LCD panel, programmable on/off, brew temperature control (the default is a little too hot for my wife), digital clock, 48 oz. water reservoir, and as I mentioned before, 18 K-Cup Variety pack. If you order one, consider ordering the Keurig B60 through our associated Amazon store.

Matthew Mullenweg announced at Wordpress.org that Wordpress 2.1 “Ella” is available for download. Here at Like that Idea we found the upgrade to be no more or no less difficult than past Wordpress upgrades. It’s too early to tell, but there does appear to be a performance improvement attibuted to one of the changes in Wordpress 2.1.

Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.

I wish more coders of content management systems would get the “database experts” involved in reviewing how well or not so well their project is utilizing the database. We did however run into a problem with one of the new features included in Wordpress 2.1.

A tabbed editor that allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.

The problem? After the upgrade, the editor contained neither the tabs nor the WYSIWYG editor. I figure there must be a way to toggle on the editor but found there is no option if you go through the administrative “Users > Authors & Users” to edit the name. What’s going on? Well it looks as if you can only toggle on this feature by editing your own profile thorugh your own profile by either going to “My Profile” or “Users > Your Profile”. No big deal, but it just wasn’t intuititve enough for me.

Additional new features and changes listed in this version of Wordpress that I think I will like include:

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again. I’m a habitual browser closer before saving my work…so this will be a big one for for me! So far I’ve found this works very well.
• The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
• You can set any ?page? to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.
• Pages can now be drafts, or private.
• Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
• A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.

Developers are also expected to like the cleaner code, API improvements, and a number of other improvements since Wordpress 2.0 was released. Most of these improvements should especially help in Wordpress plugin development.

References:

1. Original Announcement
2. Download Page for Wordpress 2.1 at Wordpress.org

As you know, we are big fans of the blogging application, Wordpress. Like that Idea is now running on Wordpress 2.0.6. Not only some security and bug fixes are included in this release but also some minor new features.New to this version of Wordpress:

• Security fixes.
• HTML quicktags now work in Safari browsers.
• Comments are filtered to prevent them from messing up your blog layout.
• Compatibility with PHP/FastCGI setups.

You can find more information about Wordpress at Wordpress.org, of course! Also, you can check out Bryan’s own CMS Report for more content and links to articles on Wordpress.

I’ve never even been to New York City. Still you have to like these New York Heros…

• The NYC Subway Hero that risked his own life to save the life of a 19 year-old man.
• The two heroes that caught a three year-old child that was falling to his death.