The rivalry between Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks can be compared to that of republicans and democrats. OK, maybe it’s not that serious, but each store has their own cult following consisting of millions around the globe. But which one is actually better? Here is my objective-as-possible analysis according to the following categories: drinks, food, service, and price.

Drinks
In terms of plain ole regular coffee, Starbucks has more of the gourmet flavors while Dunkin Donuts is more of your typical 7-11 or McDonald’s type of coffee taste. Dunkin Donuts will happily customize your regular coffee with milk, sugar and whatever else you ask for; Starbucks prefers to direct you to their condiment bar. Each has specialty drinks consisting of Lattes, Mochas, etc. Here Starbucks takes the edge as they have really pioneered specialty coffee and Dunkin Donuts has copied many of their beverage ideas. Overall I’d say Starbucks wins in the drink category, even though they don’t foo-foo up your drink, the quality of their drinks is superior to Dunkin Donuts.

Food
Starbucks gets all of its food delivered fresh each morning. My best guess is the same occurs for Dunkin Donuts (though some can make their own food). Starbucks does no food preparation, and sells everything “as is.” Dunkin Donuts will prepare your bagel however you want it and put whatever you want on it. Let’s not forget also, donuts! Starbucks sells a few different types of donuts during breakfast hours, but doesn’t even compare to Dunkin Donuts in this respect. Dunkin Donuts easily wins the food category.

Service
I’ve experienced good and bad service at both Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. That being said, I’m going to have to give Starbucks the edge here. At every Starbucks I go to I can expect the same service and atmosphere, as well as a clean and friendly customer environment. I can’t say the same for Dunkin Donuts, there have been ones I’ve walked into then walked right back out. Starbucks wins here.

Price
Starbucks charges close to $5 for a venti (large) size of some of its beverages. Dunkin Donuts, well, does not. Pretty much across the board you will find that Dunkin Donuts prices are cheaper than Starbucks. Dunkin Donuts wins easily here.

So after reviewing the 4 categories they are tied at 2-2, with Starbucks winning drinks and service, and Dunkin Donuts winning food and price. I hadn’t planned for them to turn out in a tie like this, but now that they have, what is the tiebreaker? I’m gonna have to say proximity. I think the ultimate underlying factor that sways people one way or the other is how close the nearest one is. In college I was a Starbucks man as there was one right down the block. However post college I am now a Dunkin Donuts goer as there is one very close to my house and another near my work. So in the end, where you end up going will depend on how far you want to travel.

I have tried to be as objective as possible in this evaluation, trying to leave out any feelings or thoughts as a former Starbucks employee that could have influenced this argument one way or another. I think I have done a pretty good job of that, but by all means let me know if you think I’ve been biased anywhere. Otherwise, I look forward to some comments on your part.

In the latest series of unfortunate events for the company that just keeps on sucking, today my New Jersey Transit train was 5-10 minutes delayed due to their ever-popular “mechanical problems” issue. While typically a 5-10 minute delay is no big deal, today is an exception to that notion because the temperature is about 10 degrees with a roughly 30-mph wind howling around, making it feel about -5 F.

I can’t for the life of me understand why the company can’t just be honest with its passengers. Some of us have to walk a mile and a half to the train station, so to get there and have to wait longer for a delayed train in horrible weather without knowing why, I get a little upset. Why can’t they just say: “we’re sorry for the delay passengers, but our rail system isn’t equipped to handle extreme temperatures so we’re running on a 5-10 minute delay?” No, instead they throw some prerecorded mumbo-jumbo over a loudspeaker stating, “the 7:28 train to Hoboken is experiencing a 5-10 minute delay due to mechanical problems.”

New Jersey Transit would do well to take a course in customer service and satisfaction, but not from Best Buy.

A study from BBC News says that the position in which a person sleeps provides valuable insight about the individual’s personality. Professor Chris Idzikowski of the UK Sleep Assessment and Advisory Service studied six common sleeping positions and found that the way people sleep is connected to personality characteristics.

I’m a cross between the foetus and yearner positions, which according to Idzikowski, means the following:

Foetus
Those who curl up in the foetus position are described as tough on the outside but sensitive at heart. They may be shy when they first meet somebody, but soon relax. This is the most common sleeping position, adopted by 41% of the 1,000 people who took part in the survey. More than twice as many women as men tend to adopt this position.

Yearner
People who sleep on their side with both arms out in front are said to have an open nature, but can be suspicious, cynical. They are slow to make up their minds, but once they have taken a decision, they are unlikely ever to change it.

The study concluded that the freefall position was the best for digesting food, while the soldier and starfish positions led to snoring and bad sleep most frequently.

To find how what your sleeping pattern says about you, visit the BBC study on sleep positions.

This company just cannot get its act together. Today, in continuation of the seemingly endless array of problems it faces, New Jersey Transit derailed a train on a rail switch between the Main and Bergen lines. Note to readers: the Bergen line is the one I commute on twice daily.

Thankfully I woke up at 6 A.M. this morning to make church at 7 A.M. for Ash Wednesday, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this post on a train right now, I’d still be waiting. Typically I take a train at around 8:30 A.M., which once transfers are all said and done will put me at work between 9:15-9:30 A.M. However today I reached the train station at 7:40 A.M. just after mass.

The train station looked crowded upon arrival, but I was excited thinking I would catch the 7:45 A.M. train and arrive at work a bit early today and get some extra stuff done. To my dismay, I stood amongst the masses for approximately 10 minutes with absolutely zero inkling of what was occurring just a few stops away. Finally a woman’s voice came through the loudspeaker, and said “due to mechanical problems, all trains are indefinitely delayed in both directions.” Funny I thought, “mechanical problems,” they seem to be fond of that one.

A little more waiting and finally some rumors started to circulate through the crowd about a train derailment a few stops away. Nothing was official, so we continued to wait, patiently scanning the tracks looking for some sort of activity. The rumors continued to build, and I whipped out my Sidekick to log onto to NJ Transit’s web site. Yup, rumors confirmed, the web site acknowledged the derailment and said to expect significant delays.

Another loudspeaker announcement a few minutes later said that all eastbound trains would be arriving on the westbound side of the track, so me and 400 other people made the trek to the opposite side of the train station. After waiting a few minutes on that side, another loudspeaker announcement claimed that there would be over one hour delays on all trains. OK, we thought, but was this effective as of now or retroactive to the trains that were supposed to arrive 2 hours ago?

Our question was answered when a train finally arrived a few minutes later, but not before media helicopters starting buzzing around overhead. So it appears as if I will make it into work on time today, but only thanks to Ash Wednesday. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

Today is Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of the Season of Lent. For Catholics like myself, Lent is a time of penance, reflection and fasting in preparation for Christ’s resurrection on Easter Sunday, which is only attained through redemption. Our foreheads will be marked with ashes in the sign of a cross to humble our hearts and remind us that life on Earth passes away. In Genesis 3:19, just after Eve has consumed the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, God says to Adam:

“By the sweat of your face shall you get bread to eat, Until you return to the ground, from which you were taken; For you are dirt, and to dirt you shall return.”

The ashes we receive are made from the burning of the blessed palms used in the Palm Sunday celebration of the previous year. Ash Wednesday is a day of fasting, abstinence (from meat), and repentance. Catholics between the age of 18 and 59 are allowed only one full meal, which may be supplemented by two smaller meals that must not equal the amount of the full meal when combined. However, this is the bare minimum requirement and traditionally Catholics will perform a complete fast or a bread and water fast. Similar fasting is also required on Good Friday, and abstinence from meat is mandatory on all Fridays of Lent.

The Lent Season lasts 40 days from Ash Wednesday until Holy Saturday, Sundays do not count as days as they are reserved for the joyful celebration of the Resurrection. The 40 days symbolize the time that Jesus spent retreated in the wilderness, overcoming temptation and preparing for His ministry.

There are numerous Holy Days during Lent:

• Ash Wednesday - the first day of Lent
• Palm Sunday - the last Sunday of Lent, marks the beginning of Holy Week
• Spy Wednesday - the Wednesday during Holy Week, signifies the time Judas spent spying on Jesus before betraying him
• Maundy Thursday - the Thursday during Holy Week, commemorates the Last Supper
• Good Friday - the Friday during Holy Week, remembers Jesus’ crucifixion and burial

As Lent is a time to repent, Catholics generally are called to sacrifice something during this period. But it goes beyond this, it is more than just behaving in a certain manner for 40 days. Lent is about conversion and aligning our lives more closely to Jesus and His way of life. This means giving up sin in some form, and not just to abstain from sin during this period, but to reflect on it and root it out of our lives forever.

My Lenten promise this year is to give up sweets and soda, which can lead to gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins. Also, I will be making a more concerted effort to not argue with friends and family, and to be a more loving, kinder person to all. Jesus said “love your enemies, for even sinners love those who love them,” and I think if we all pondered these words and took them to heart the world would be a much happier and peaceful place.

In addition to my sacrifices I will also be undertaking additional things which require a stronger devotion to God and His only Son Jesus Christ, but those are more of a personal nature and I don’t care to write about them on here. Also, I will make a trip confession during Lent, which I think all Catholics should do during this time of year.

For more information, you can read about Ash Wednesday and Lent on Wikipedia. Also, you read the entire text of Pope Benedict XVI’s message for Lent 2007.

Let me start off by saying its a rarity that I cook. I’m typically one to order delivery or go and pick something up except for special occasions (such as the $30 for 30 diet of rice and Ramen). However, there has been this recipe of a friend of mine that Carin and I have been dying to try our hands at: tuna tartare.

There’s not really much to say about the process of making it, we simply made a trip to the local grocery store for supplies then followed the instructions as laid out. In the end we came up with something that was not only edible but rather delicious:

For complete ingredient list and instructions visit Erika Strum’s tuna tartare recipe.

I mentioned in comments of my introductory post about Yahoo Pipes that I would be creating a few of them to better illustrate some of the functionality that is possible. If you recall, my first Yahoo Pipe was a visualization of this blog in Flickr photos, specifically the recent entries in my RSS feed.

Today I have created another Yahoo Pipe to highlight a different kind of functionality. This would is a bit simpler to create than the last entry, yet it is just as useful if not more so. The Yahoo Pipe I have created is called Jon Holato in German. As you’re certainly aware, the internet is a global market with a global audience, and not everyone in the world speaks English. Today I’ll be showing you how to syndicate your site in German through Yahoo Pipes, for the benefit of all our friends in Germany. For the record I do not speak an inkling of German so everything you will see is straight from Yahoo Pipes.

This pipe is very simple as there are only two necessary steps to achieve of goal of syndicating in German. Step 1 is pulling in the data source that we want to turn into German. To accomplish this we simply need to use a Fetch pipe where we will copy and paste the link to our RSS feed. The pipe we’re using for step 2 is just the Babelfish operator, where we select a “from and to languages,” in this case I selected “English to German.” Once these two pipes are made just connect the Fetch to Babelfish and then connect Babelfish to Pipe Output and you’re done. If you’ve done this correctly your pipe should look as follows:

If this is how yours looks go ahead and run the pipe and check out your RSS feed in German.

Now you are syndicating in another language and are able to reach millions of potential customers. Recall that “Subscribe” drop down menu on the right-hand side of this output page.

My Valentine’s Day festivities began at around 1:30pm yesterday. After finishing my half day of work, I departed for the closest general store, which is 1.5 miles away from my apartment. So, upon layering up and strapping on my waterproof hiking boots (recall that there was a blizzard yesterday), I headed out into a blanket of horizontal ice and snow on a mission in search of candles and rose pedals.

I arrived at the store in about 30 minutes. Typically, when the streets aren’t covered with 5 inches of snow topped with ice, this walk takes me approximately 15 minutes. Upon arrival I rummaged through the aisles in search of candles, knowing upon entering that the flowers were placed near the register counter. I stumbled across the candles in the middle of aisle 4, but not before my boots thudded around on the floor of the store like I was the guy Sylvester Stallone was going after in the beginning of Cobra. I purchased the items and began the trek back home which took an equivalent 30 minutes as the initial expedition.

When I got home the real fun began, as I had to setup my plan so that it would be perfectly executed. The plan, you may be wondering, was to blow Carin away with overwhelming romanticism and provide her with the best Valentine’s Day ever.

I had been planning to make a candlelit trail of rose pedals around my apartment that led to numerous items and ended at the grand finale, hence the need to trek through a blizzard to purchase candles and rose pedals. I bought 18 candles and a dozen pink roses to use for the pedals (I had already bought a dozen red roses the night before to give to her as normal flowers). When you open the door to enter my place the first thing you see are stairs, so I put two candles on the first step (one on each side), and then a candle on every 3rd step to the top of the staircase. At the top of the staircase were a dozen red roses.

After the roses the flower trail continued to the bottom of my TV stand, where there lay a small picture frame from Nieman Marcus. After that, the trail flipped back around onto a small table where my rice cooker typically stands, and here lay a card that I had written for her. Then the pedals continued down along the side of my apartment to a corner where all of my DJ equipment sits, and on top of one of my record cases sat a teddy bear with 3 velcro blocks that had interchangeable messages on each, and I had set the 3 blocks facing out to read “I love you.”

After the teddy bear the candles and flowers circled around the futon and ended up on the main coffee table, where I had covered the tables in rose pedals and had a bottle of wine, two wine glasses, and two bottles of mountain dew (our favorite drink). There was also one candle in front of a picture of the two of us, which was the second candle on the coffee table, thus signifying a hidden meaning. When she reaches the table she will see both candles and the wine and assume that is the end. However, the second candle signifies something additional, which is this case is her main gift that is lying under the table hidden from sight.

I was rushing up until the last second to get everything situated properly. Between cleaning my apartment, getting ready myself, and setting up the plan, time was definitely not on my side. Carin finally arrived and I was vehemently rushing to finish everything, literally sweating from running around trying to light all the candles before she walked in. I met her at the door just after I had finished lighting all the candles and everything was in place and I told her not to turn on any of the lights, “just follow the candles and rose pedals,” I told her.

She followed the course I had laid out exactly, and just as expected, she didn’t catch the significance of the very last candle on the coffee table. By the time she had reached the coffee table she was glowing with all of the goodies she had picked up along the way. We sat down on the futon and I began to open the wine while she opened her card. When I finished opening the wine and poured two glasses for us I looked over at her and she had just finished reading the card and was fighting back tears. Next she insisted that I open her gifts to me. I started by reading two cards from her, one funny, one cute. Then I opened up a bag and saw a pair of red Hershey’s Kisses silk boxers, my first ever pair of silk boxers and certainly fitting for the occasion. Next I opened up a medium-sized present and it was a “you & me” heart-shaped piggy bank. Carin and I have longed saved our spare change in a container laying around my apartment and she’s been saying for so long how we should get a piggy bank that we can both add to and save the money for a vacation. The piggy bank is a heart that splits in two with one half saying “you” and the other one saying “me.” A wonderful gift as it fulfills the V-Day requirement and a long-term goal of ours. The final gift I opened was a shocker. Upon picking it up I thought and said aloud, “well this is clearly cologne.” However, to my surprise I unsheathed the wrapping paper to reveal an iPod Nano, something I had been longing for since my 3-year-old iPod stopped working (after Carin dropped it) last November.

After I finished opening my gifts I went to grab the wine glasses for us and was just about to hand her a glass when I said “oh, wait, you missed something.” Of course I knew she would miss it, but I just thought I would be a little sneaky so I informed her of the significance of the second candle on the table and reached under the table to pull out her main gift: a heart necklace from David Yurman.

She opened it with the biggest smile I had ever seen come from her and it made me feel so good knowing she was so happy. After that we finished a bit more wine then had to leave for the restaurant, noticing that we were running a bid late due to all of the excitement.

We went to an Italian restaurant called Mezza Notte. I have no idea what that translates to, but the food was pretty good. I got the fried calamari appetizer, with the surf and turf (filet and lobster) for my main course. Carin got a mozzarella, tomato and onion platter for her appetizer, and the lobster ravioli for her main dish. Naturally we both shared with each other on all items. When dinner was finished we went back to my apartment to grab the bottle of wine and the goodies we had left behind then left for her place where we would be staying the night.

Upon arriving at her place we finished off the bottle of wine, played a little bit of Wii, and went to sleep to the sound of the wind howling. When I woke up this morning the wind was still howling, but I was delighted with the sight of a four-legged chihuahua.

All in all it was a pretty amazing Valentine’s Day, despite the blizzard, and I accomplished both of my goals as Carin’s romance-o-meter was overloaded yesterday and she confessed to having the best Valentine’s Day ever without question. And that’s how I showed my appreciation to the woman behind me kicking my butt to succeed in this world.

To all of my female readers: Happy Valentine’s Day. To all of my male readers: gird your wallets. OK seriously, just wanted to wish the many women who frequent here a Happy Valentine’s Day; may you be spoiled as much as my girlfriend Carin will be tonight.

And to the men here, if you have a significant other hopefully you have something planned if you care about maintaining your relationship, otherwise try to find someone to celebrate with tonight, even if it just a friend of the opposite sex, nobody wants to spend today totally alone.

I know many people dismiss today as a “Hallmark Holiday,” (myself included at times) and there is some truth to that, but its good to have a day where we can stop and appreciate our better halves. There’s a saying that goes something like: “behind every great man there’s a woman kicking his butt,” and believe it or not I think more often than not this can generally be accepted as true.

So men, here’s to showing our appreciation for the women who keep us in line…

Some of you regulars may have noticed a few changes, some may have not or have not seen them yet. So to prevent any cardiac arrest from utter shock, I am gonna give you a little rundown on what’s been going on around here.

Two nights ago I deactivated the SNAP Preview plugin. While I have nothing against this plugin and am actually pretty fond of the little bugger, it slowed down the performance of the site as far as load time and it brought about strange javascript errors in my administration panel; particularly when editing posts.

After a few nights of rummaging I have finally settled on a theme.  It comes courtesy of the good people at Utombox and after a bit of customization (removing one of the sidebars to make it 2-column instead of 3) I almost have it fine tuned to my liking. To go along with this theme I have activated/installed numerous plugins: recent comments, recent last.fm tracks, most popular posts, top commenters, and flickrrss. I also added in the old banners I used to have in a different theme a month or so back.

That’s about all for now. Thanks to all of you who continuously read this little blog that could, and kudos to my top commenter Christine for having nothing better to do while drinking her coffee.