Illy Sneaks into the US Coffee Market

Italian coffee company Illy is signing up independent coffee shop owners in the USA to stealthfully take on Starbucks.

Top Customers Upset About Starbucks Reward Card Changes

Starbucks customers are reacting to the news that gold customers will lose their 10% discount under the new rewards program.

As I expressed on Thursday, I don't think this new reward program is actually going to benefit us as customers.

Friday Book Review: A Long Way Gone

There are some books that you read and they really stick with you. A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah is certainly one of those books. In it the author details his life growing up in Sierra Leone in the 1990's.

Starting when he was 12 a bloddy civil war between the government and rebels forced him out of his village and separated him from his family. For months he and other refugees try to find a safe place away from all of the fighting to live safely and try to reconnect with his lost family. Then he is conscripted into the Sierra Leone Army where he is brainwashed and addicted to drugs all to make him a better solidier. For two years he lives in a constant state of kill or be killed without really knowing the true reasons behind the conflict.

Finally at 15, he is rescued in the form of being sent to a UNICEF transistion center. This is where the child soldiers are integrated back into normal life. He is sent to live with an uncle he doesn't know and all is good for a short time until strife comes to the capital. At this point Beah decides to flee to America.

Luckily he is adopted by Laura Simms, a woman he had met a year earlier when he participated in a Children of War conference at the UN. Now Mr. Beah has graduated from college with a degree in politics and is a human rights activist.

I listened to the audio book version of the text ready by the author himself. His lilting voice and matter of fact manner in describing all sorts of horrors he's seen and committed certainly added to the gravity of the subject matter. It is hard to imagine a situation like this with my comfy North American life experiences.

This book is rated a solid buy and it will bring you tears on more than one occassion.

Starbucks to Offer Frequent Buyer Program

Starbucks is changing the way their Starbucks Card program works. The new program is called My Starbucks Rewards and has a variety of reward levels. Each time you make a purchase with your card you earn a star. After 5 stars you get a variety of rewards like 2 hours of free wi-fi per day that you currently get with the current reward card program. After 30 stars you start earning free coffees for every 15 stars.

My take is that it makes things worse for the current Starbucks card users but makes things better for Starbucks Gold card users as there will no longer be a yearly fee associated with that card level.

CoffeeCupNews.org

CoffeeCupNews.org has quickly become one of top coffee blogs. Here are a few of articles that I've enjoyed over the past week:

• How To Grind and Make Turkish Coffee
• I am not a paper cup: Reusable cup
• Starbucks Grande: Explains where the names of the different sizes of coffee come from.

Friday Book Review: Rocket Men

Whoops, I forgot to move this post from the draft to published state. So here is my review of Rocket Men a couple of days later than intended.

When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut. I would have liked to be a NHL hockey player but I knew I was good enough but maybe just maybe I could be one of those people going up on the space shuttle. After all Marc Garneau was going up on those shuttles and he was Canadian. One of my all time favourite family vacations included a trip to the Cape Canaveral, Florida where we watched a shuttle take off and visited the Kennedy Space Center where I got this shiny silver jacket with a NASA patch on the shoulder. I probably still have that jacket somewhere at home.

This leads me to Rocket Men The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon. It is an incredible story of the 9 years and 400,000 people it took to send three men (Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins) into space, landing two on the moon and getting them all back safe again.

This is a very interesting book detailing the vast amounts of effort it required from to land men on the moon. It goes into details describing the men of the Apollo 11 mission and how it affected their lives. It truly is amazing how flimsy the lunar lander was, basically a metal cage wrapped in tin foil, and how Armstrong and Aldrin nearly were stuck on the moon only saved by some quick thinking an a felt tipped pen. Which is where I'm guessing The Simpsons get their inanimate carbon rod joke from.

For fans of space this is an excellent book to go out and buy but if you are just casually interested I suggest borrowing it from your local library.

How Many Calories in a Cup of Coffee?

Over at CoffeeCupNews.org they have a quick run down of the calorie content of the most popular Java based beverages.