Ron Gilmour

This post will introduce a new theme to this blog, namely tea. I have been a tea enthusiast for some years but have been reluctant to blog about it because there are so many perfectly good tea blogs out there by people who know so much more than I do, that I’m a little bit embarrassed. Still, I’d like to write about something while I’m finishing the next Trollope novel and I’m not going to stoop to speculating about the presidential primaries.

So a week ago I received a shipment of samples from a tea company called Harney & Sons in Salisbury, Connecticut. Yesterday I invited a friend over and we had a tasting party. The samples ranged from really good to really awful, so I thought it might make an interesting post. I’ll start with the good stuff. Prices listed in parenthesis are for a 4 oz. tin.

Golden Blend ($10.00) – really excellent! Nice and smooth with a very slight peppery quality. A blend of something called “golden monkey” from Fujian, China and FTGFOP Assam. I’d definitely buy this again.

All-India Blend ($6.50) – very interesting blend of teas from India’s three major tea-producing regions: Assam, Darjeeling, and Nilgiri. I’m a big Darjeeling fan and I admit it wouldn’t have occurred to me to mix Darjeeling with anything, but this is quite good. The Darjeeling gives it a nice perfumey quality while the Assam provides body.

Organic Assam GBOP ($6.25) – really good basic Assam. Has all the body and maltiness that you could ever ask for, and you can’t beat the price. Plus you get all those warm fuzzy feelings from buying organic.

Selimbong Second Flush Darjeeling ($29.00) – I’m a huge fan of Darjeeling tea, and decided that I would try a sample of a high-end Darjeeling to see how it differed from the mid-grade stuff that I normally drink. I have to say that this is a wonderful tea. The aroma is heavenly–very lively and floral. The taste is very smooth without much of the astringency that I’m used to in Darjeelings. Still, $29 is kind of rich for my blood. I think I’ll be sticking with my favorite organic first flush Darjeeling from Tao of Tea for about half the price.

Formosa Oolong ($4.75 for 3 oz.) – very nice oolong. Not spectacular, but definitely a good tea for the price. Nice woodsy aroma.

Ti Quan Yin, Spring Floral ($10.00) – This was a disappointment. In the past I’ve had Ti Quan Yin that I really like, but I’m learning that there is a lot of variation within the “Ti Quan Yin” designation. This one is very green, to the point where it hardly tastes like an oolong at all. In fact it reminded me of some bagged green teas that I’ve tried, and that’s not a good thing. This is Harney & Son’s “budget” Ti Quan Yin, so maybe I should have splurged for the good stuff, but since their “Top Ti Quan Yin” is $65.00 for 4 oz., that’s not very likely.

Elyse’s Blend ($10.00) – new sneakers? tires? diesel fuel? This tea had a strange chemical scent that I couldn’t quite place. But I assure you that none of the things it reminded me of were anything I would want in my tea cup. This tea is a mixture of Assam, Kenya, and Ceylon teas “slightly sweetened with honey flavors.” I can only assume that the “honey flavors” are to blame for the chemical quality. I could only choke down a few sips.

So, despite those last two, my overall review of Harney & Sons is positive. I’ll probably order from them again. They offer $2.00 sample size packets of many of their teas and I’m glad that I took advantage of this. I wouldn’t want to be stuck with 4 oz. of Elyse’s Blend.

In the past, I’ve thought that the catch phrase “Web 2.0″ was terribly silly, but the fact remains that there is some really cool stuff out there that makes the web more interesting than it was a few years ago. So I thought I’d share some of my favorite new things (well, they’re new to me) in the web technology area. Note that all of these are free.

del.icio.us
For those of you who haven’t joined the ranks of social bookmarkers, del.icio.us is a wonderful tool for organizing your bookmarks and sharing them with others. Best of all, since it is web-based, your bookmarks are available to you from any computer you might be using. Once you “tag” a site in del.icio.us (i.e., save the site to your bookmark list and associate it with keywords of your choosing) you can see who else has saved the site and then take a look at those bookmark lists to look for more sites on the topic. For the developer, del.icio.us also has a very easy to use API if you’d like to display your links in a web page. If you’d like to take a look at my del.icio.us links, go here.

Zotero
You probably have to be either a student or a librarian to love this one. Zotero is a Firefox plugin that allows you to save snapshots of web pages and other research documents. It’s somewhere between advanced bookmark management and a citation helper like EndNote. Once saved, documents can be organized into folders and also tagged with keywords. Bulk imports from many databases are possible.

GoogleDocs
This one is so simple that’s it’s easy to take for granted. Back when the web was invented, wasn’t it supposed to be a collaborative work space? Somehow that vision got lost, but GoogleDocs makes it very easy to share and collaboratively edit documents like word processing files and spreadsheets.

WordPress
I spent years laughing at the whole bloggin phenomenon, but I have finally caved in and started to write, and even read, blogs. If you’re looking for a way to set up a blog and you have your own server space, consider installing WordPress rather than going with the various web-based blog engines. WordPress allows unbelievable customization. With a little knowledge of PHP, you can tweak WordPress to do just about anything, including convincing it to function as a full-fledged content management system. As a CMS, it is far easier to use than any of the “real” CMSs like Droopal or Joomla.

That’s it for now. I may think of some more, but those are Ron’s top picks for Web 2.0. Feel free to share contrasting opinions.