the world of coffee

This semester (Fall 2011), I'm finding myself in a different type of academic world. This academic world is maleable. Moves where I want it to and comes up where I see best fit. The beginning of my GIS/Certificate program, again at UW-Madison, has started off quickly but seems to move at a pace that I can control. Working in the cartography lab helps me keep my lens focused on what I desire to reach for in a career, while classes seem to compliment basically everything I have gone to school for. I'm currently in advanced quantitative methods, which is a fancy name for upper statistics and introduction to remote sensing. These are structured classes that extend beyond what I originally anticipated as a hobby; opening up the world of geographic data and its sources and how one can basically find relationships between anything and everything. Hence, Tobler's first law of geography, which is basically summed up by the following: a point is more relatively related to an object closer to itself in a trip, path connectivity sense, than things that are relatively further away.

Now that I've rambled about nonsense that nobody cares about. Let's get to the part where the sub text matches what the title briefly mentioned. This, folks, is coffee. For the sake of my lack of sleep and future posts, I'm going to leave coffee as non-researched as it seems in this post. Coffee is the basis of my next project. An independent study, mentored through my boss Tanya, will give me the opportunity to research and develop a project about coffee. Since I am in the GIS/Cart. program and if you only slightly knew me, you better believe that this is going to turn into a full on map-poster. That's correct, I will be earning a full two credits based purely on the idea of coffee.

Now, I know this may seem silly to some (it does to me so don't worry), but hold your horses (in a contemporary sense, keep your foot off the pedal, or finger off the enter key to leave distasteful comments about my attitude towards academics). This aint going to be no walk in the park or fairy flop of a project, I'm turning it into a cross study between coffee and itself, as well as the fair trade, organic components involved in world trade. I want to look from a world point of view all the way down to the local (Madison). Example here. Therefore, for the next few months, this blog will serve me as a means of gathering my research and thoughts about coffee, maps of coffee, cups of coffee, beans of coffee, bags of coffee, grounds of coffee, and data of coffee. It's all turning into the real deal and I'm not talking about the jumbo long island from the Red Shed Bar.

I plan on doing this entire project while going crazy on caffeine and shaking like a mad man because of the pots of coffee I will consume. Prepare yourself, body of mine, because tonight might be the last real night of sleep you get in a while.