The Ethiopians rule the world ...

... or at least, their legacy does. Thanks to a funny little shrub that was native to the arid areas, the world got hooked on coffee. And my week has revolved around that little brew.

I've spent most of the week in a self-styled war room with a bunch of very smart chaps, one of whom comes from Canada. He and I got to talking about coffee, and he mentioned he was seriously impressed with the quality of the coffee here in Oz. He'd been expecting wall-to-wall Starbucks anticoffee, but instead had found every city block in Sydney is festooned with cafes, barristas, and frothed milk of the first order.

We started conducting an experiment - did all "large" cappuccinos by definition suck, due to the screwed ratios of shots-of-coffee to milk. Make a large cap with one shot, it tastes week and milky. Make it with two, and it's like an ash milkshake. (Hey, I've just reverse-engineering the secret recipe of every cafe franchise!)

In our huge sample of 6 coffees from 2 cafes, yes, regular is king!

The week wound up with me talking to a friend of mine about database problems she was having at work (the word having gotten out that I knew the pointy end of a Select statement when I saw one :-) ). Turns out to be the kind of problem that needs a little inspection (Oracle DB won't start, get's hung between startup and mount phases - I suspect a disk is dying and the symptom is presenting as intermittently unavailable data file. If they reboot, it will come to life most of the time, but is now taking more reboots ... never a good way to treat a database server anyway).

And guess where she works? A coffee company :-)

And then on to the weekend, where the quest to find the best flat white in Newtown continues. Today, the cafe was (and I kid you not) "Catfish Gotta Eat". Thankfully, they weren't making the coffee with said fish. My flat white ... OK. Lindsay's cappuccino was apparently excellent. Too early to tell - there are another 138 cafes and restaurants to check :-)