Adam Ostrow over at Mashable.com was the one to bring the “beta” coffee offer from Joffrey’s Coffee to my attention.

The idea is simple in that up to 10,000 bloggers can go to their site, fill out the form, and not only will you get some free coffee, but you’ll also get a link back to your blog from them. The links are a little momentous to pick through, but Google should pick it up and count it as a little bit of link love for you.

The free coffee you’ll receive is a new flavor named “Jamican Me Crazy” which is a blend of caramel, vanilla and coffee liqueur. I’m not one to thrill to flavored coffee, but it’s free, and I’m a sucker for free. Hopefully it will be good, but if it’s not, I’m out 30-seconds of my time filling out their form.

Last time I looked, they were still under 1,000 slots filled, so there is still plenty of time for my readers to run over and snap up one of those 10,000 spots.

I have mocked the idea of “beta” tests before, and this one is such an obvious gimmick to get bloggers to talk about it, and… wait… aw man! I fell for their obvious marketing gimmick! -sips coffee- Curses.

A little while back I downloaded Google Talk on to my beloved BlackBerry 8830.  It’s a great little piece of software that gives me all of my normal Google Talk functionalities: status, chats, saves the chat histories to my account, and so on.

Now, here’s the problem.  I downloaded the program and set it up with my editors that every night I go to bed, log in on my phone, and set my status to “Sleeping/msgs fwd to phone”. (I hate text speech, but it’s needed here)  The idea was that I have bosses all over the planet, I actually do not blog for anyone who lives in the United States, so sometimes they need to reach me at odd hours.  Since it’s a work situation, I am perfectly okay with them waking me up to say “Hey, your article needs an imge corrected” or “Can you rework piece X?”

However, the problem is my friends have decided I’m not actually sleeping, and just being a lazy butt that hasn’t changed his status.  I have been woken up several mornings now, well before my alarm going off, to “Hey, Sean, are you asleep?”… No, my status message says that for fun… My answers are usually the Internet equivalent of a grunt, and then they continue to talk since I am obviously awake… YOU WOKE ME UP!

I have spoken all the friends who have done this, and vowed not to repeat their transgressions, but it got me to thinking about other things, such as are we TOO connected now?  It’s nice to be able to log in once in awhile to check on things, but with all of the abilities to stay connected now, it’s like I lways have a tether on my leg.

Yes, I realize I could just turn it off, but I feel with the international flavor of my bosses, I have made the right choice to let them get a hold of me.  Now if I could just get all of my friends to believe my status message a bit more so I could get some sleep!  It’s the Internet folks, I would assume you know how to read!

(and, as a note to the few who have done it, we’ve talked and you know I’m not THAT annoyed… just slightly)

I recently wrote a list for Mashable about preparing for your death on the Internet. It was actually inspired by a story I came across for another list I was working on (I swear, I make lists in my sleep now). It was a blog post done by a blogger who had been killed in Iraq. He had the forethought to write a post to be published after his death, and posted by a friend when they got the news he had died.

There’s nothing to say about that except that it touched me, and it made me wonder what would happen to my online presence if I was to suddenly die. Thus was born the “death list”.

It may seem like an odd thing to sit around and think about it, but with our online lives becoming such a vital part of our everyday lives, it has to be adressed. I have always thought about my eventual death in real world terms, even to the point I made my will when I was 18, but the online part of life just had not crossed my mind before, which surprised me.

So, what do you do? How do you even know when or how it will happen? The blogger I mentioned above, Major Andrew Olmdstead, at least had a clue what might happen. For all I know I could die at the age of 98 from the bite of a badger, or I might keel over tomorrow as I tear the hair from my head over having accidentally turned the TV to the Rachael Ray show, you just never know what’s going to happen.

And, as I said, worrying about what will happen with your online persona may seem silly, but it is such an integrated part of my life, I have to. When Adam Finley, a blogger for TV Squad, was killed by colliding with a bus while riding his bike, his coworkers didn’t know for a few days. If I don’t set up some sort of system to alert people, you might all be coming by this blog for a year, thinking I just turned in to some lazy ass who never updates. Who would tell my bosses at Mashable? I’ve never met any of my co-workers in blogging, I don’t even have phone numbers for a goodly number of them. Would my social networking profiles stay on the web for an eternity? Would my membership to NaughtyGrandmas.com keep auto renewing?!? (note: I randomly picked that name… then learned it was a real website… I then died a little inside)

For now, I plan to write some sort of “I was killed by a rabid squirrel” post, that I will keep up-to-date as time goes on, and I am talking with someone about posting it for me when they would get the notice I had passed. I am also making a list of all my accounts on every site I belong to, the usernames, and the passwords so my family or someone else can go in and deactivate all the accounts. I’m not thrilled about writing all that information down somewhere as I then have to worry about keeping that physical list safe, but I’ll figure something out.

This post doesn’t serve much purpose beyond telling you I plan to do all of this, but I also hoped it might motivate some of you to start thinking about your plans for that inevitable moment that comes to every one. Are you prepared? Do you have a will? Someone that will let your blog readers know that you have moved on to signing the choir invisible?

No matter how old you are, it’s never the wrong time to start thinking about this stuff, no matter how depressing you may find the subject, just remember how bad it could be folks if you didn’t plan. I’ve found the best way to get around it is to keep a sense of humor about the whole thing, as you can see from this post. Sure, I don’t want to die anytime soon, but I also realize I have no control over this, it will happen when it happens, and it’s better to be prepared, because you sure don’t get a second shot at this.

Ugh… yeah, like pretty much every other American, I ate too much. And, yes, this picture was my dinner. Damn my weakness for stuffing!

Something interesting happened though: Why did I take a picture of my meal?

Over the past few years I have become friends with a woman from a foreign country in the Souther hemisphere (I won’t say which country as she would die of embarrassment if I identified her), and she is fascinated with Thanksgiving. Her only exposure to it has been via movies and American television shows. This has led her to have a very romanticized idea of what Thanksgiving is all about. I explained to her the true history of the holiday, but she still has this idea of how families gather and it’s all cheery and sweet.

There’s no denying it’s a good time most of the time, but nothing like the movies portray, of course. It’s interesting to ponder just how much our culture has permeated culture all around the world. I had a friend from England who told me how people would call 911 in an emergency as opposed to their 999 number. The reason being they remembered it from seeing it on American television shows.

Is this a healthy thing? Sure, in the case of my one friend, she just thinks the day sounds like fun, and it gave me an endless source of amusement. But, in the case of 911, not so much. There’s no way to stop this from happening, but you have to wonder what else it may be leading to.

You know, there are a lot of things I can do in this world.  I can assemble a brand new computer and have it on the network about ten minutes after UPS delivers it.  I can run two companies from the same desk.  I do a fair job at being a writer.  There is one place I fall flat on my face though.

Cars.

I’m lucky if I can remember where the gas goes, let alone doing anything technical.  So imagine my fun filled week when my main car, a 1999 Chevy Tahoe, had it’s battery die on me.

Now, I am sure you are saying, “Duh, Sean!  Just get some jumper cables and jump it!”  I tried that.  I suck at jumping a car and I never got it started.

Next up was the battery charger.  A-ha!  After two hours of running it on the charger, I got it started!

Now, two days later, it is sitting at work… dead again.  I have NO clue what’s wrong with it, and no clue why the battery died again.  And to make life more fun, it has to make a run to the east coast starting on Tuesday.

I hate cars.