Substance & Pinch

Choffy

Substance & Pinch sponsored a Show & Tell event last week at Substance World Headquarters. When I got to the door, there was a fellow bringing in a coffee maker and fixings, and I thought cool, there's going to be coffee. They had already promised beer, but beer doesn't hold much attraction for me these days.

It's basically happy hour and I talk to several people about various kinds of programming and the tools (i.e. more computer programs) used to write even more programs. Mostly they are talking about writing code for various web sites, which seems to be a booming business, at least in this room.

I've been checking on the coffee as I am getting thirsty, and it's kind of slow coming, but eventually it's ready so I pour myself a cup, and boy do I get a surprise. It was made in a coffee maker. Whatever it is came in bags like coffee comes in. It looks black like coffee, but it is not coffee. It's chocolate! Delicious! Jason told us all about it. It's his baby, it's new, and he calls it Choffy.

There were five other presentations:

• a little tool a programmer developed for applying sequential numbers to images, like 00 to 99 on the image of a football jersey.
• a multi-man-year project developing an elaborate web site to show the current state of salmon populations.
• an iPhone application that would allow you to mail postcards of images you took with the camera in your iPhone.
• a framework for developing web sites that laid down some fundamentals so that it would be easy to customize for different cultures and/or languages. (I hope I'm not getting this mixed up with some other presentation I saw.)
• a web site a couple of guys set up as a lark to promote and sell bacon. It only took them a few weeks, and they have stumbled into a whole world of net deprived custom bacon makers.

I had more fun here than I've had in a long time. Did the pretty girls have anything to do with it? Nah, that couldn't be the case.

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture, removed dead link.