Janice Gonnella LOVES Berolina Bakery

Berolina Bakery on Ocean View Boulevard in Glendale

Janice Gonnella Loves Good Danish

Andersen's Danish Restaurant and Bakery

I took a few members of our team to Andersen's Danish Restaurant and Bakery last week after a meeting in Santa Barbara for a delightful afternoon coffee and pastry treat with a surprising European flair.

As Amada and Bob said, "Janice Gonnella sure knows her pastry!"

Also, Andersen's is known for their fabulous breakfasts.  Maybe the next time we're in town for a meeting, we'll come in the AM!

Janice Gonnella Hearts Coffee Cat

Found myself in Santa Barbara over the weekend, and discovered this cool place for a cup of coffee.

It's got a hip vibe.  The staff is super friendly.  The coffee and pastry are just fine.  But, best of all,  you can hang out here all day with your favorite web-connecting device.

I found myself sneaking out of our hotel for two days running (while hubby and kids slumbered on) just to have a few moments to myself along with the paper, a croissant, and a cappuccino.  I'd say it's my new favorite hangout in SB.  Enjoy!  (It's at 1201 Anacapa Street.)

Janice Gonnella Drinks Mystic Monk

Janice Gonnella Recommends Mystic Monk

I just love Mystic Monk coffee.  My favorite is Breakfast Blend.  I get it shipped direct to my home.  I also bought their monk press travel mug for the perfect cup of press-brewed coffee on the road.  I've become such a coffee gourmand that I now store the beans in the Monk's airtight, stainless steel coffee vault storage.  Who knew...it stays much fresher...and the coffee is much tastier!

The following is from their website.  The monks roast their beans in small batches...which apparently makes all the difference.

Brother Java is the master coffee roaster.  His philosophy is that each small batch coffee roast must be not only the labor of his hands, but a master roast of the highest quality.  Brother Java is passionate about obtaining the perfect roasts for you.  He carefully roasts only the finest gourmet coffee beans under conditions that will make each coffee roast consistent and smooth with a taste that will make your taste buds tingle.  With experience and perfection, Mystic Monk Coffee is a coffee to savor and enjoy--with or without cream.  You will love having the monks as your small batch coffee roaster.

I've got a monthly subscription for Mystic Monk...so I never find myself home alone without coffee!

Visit their website at www.mysticmonkcoffee.com.

I know this sounds like I'm being paid to say all this.  I'm not.  Their coffee is just incredible, and I love drinking coffee with a good backstory.

Oahu, Sunset, & Dinner...Compliments of Janice Gonnella

Janice Gonnella et al at the Beach in Oahu

Here's a picture of me, Janice Gonnella, Fran Smith, Glenn Saunders, Steve Richards, Jeannine Tesco, and the rest of my team.  It's hard to tell who we are from the back, but I thought the shot captured a lovely sunset on the beach in Oahu.  As Fran said to me, "Janice Gonnella throws the most fabulous dinner parties, even in the sand!"  Thanks for the compliment, Fran.  As I always say, if you have to work hard...you might as well do it in style!  Hope you all had as much fun at the conference as I did.  I think it was a game changer for us.  Now, on to Los Angeles!"

MBA Lectures Delivered Through a Facebook Application

We've seen plenty of free, online education initiatives in recent years — University of the People is just one example — but it wasn't until recently that we came across a degree program run entirely through Facebook. Yes, that's right, the London School of Business and Finance now offers a free MBA program that's conducted through a Facebook application. Launched in late October, the LSBF Global MBA offers free access to lectures and panel discussion groups online through Facebook. Three studios in the LSBF's London campus continuously record and constantly update study material for students to stay abreast of business events, while a team of advisors is available online. Students must still have a BSc/BA or five years of professional experience in order to earn an accredited LSBF Global MBA, and they must also pay if they want accreditation. Nevertheless, hundreds of hours of free study are available to all users, including 80 hours of high-definition video content. Developed by former Google employees, the LSBF Global MBA app delivers an MBA awarded by the University of Wales. “Historically there are real barriers for people to take the time to do an MBA,” explains LSBF founder Aaron Etingen. “Our new product uses the Facebook platform. We expect to get over 500,000 users in the first year, but that is a conservative estimate.” If an MBA program can be delivered via a Facebook app, just think how many other educational offerings could be as well. One to be inspired by! (Related: Platform lets anyone create and monetize an online school — Free Ivy League courses for high schoolers.) Source:  http://www.springwise.com/education/lsbffacebook/

Unhappy Hipsters Parody Website is a Hit

An anonymously written site with real Dwell magazine photos and not-so-real captions pokes fun at owners of neo-modern digs.

February 06, 2010 | By Christopher Hawthorne | Architecture Critic

So what if the name, for all its alliterative bounce, seems not quite right? And who cares, really, if the quality has ebbed ever so slightly in the last few days?

The website Unhappy Hipsters, www.unhappyhipsters.com, is the most welcome addition to the often self-serious world of architecture and design in recent memory, not to mention a pocket of satirical warmth in the middle of a soggy, recessionary, earthquake-wracked, Martha Coakley winter.  Produced anonymously on a simple Tumblr blogging platform, it adds brief, deadpan captions to photographs from Dwell magazine (and a few other publications), most showing couples looking miserable or lonely in their spare, neo-modern houses. Quite a few of the pictures feature some version of the same basic tableau: a woman sits inside, often on the sofa, while a man stands nearby gazing out the window, silently ruing his life or plotting his escape -- or both.

Unhappy Hipsters entered the world quietly near the end of January, doling out a couple of entries per day, and soon began generating serious Web buzz. Its best captions have a pared-down rhythm to match the architecture on display, along with a forlornly superior air -- Colbert meets Sartre meets "This Is Why You're Fat."

Below an image of a man sitting on the edge of an all-white prefab house by Rocio Romero, turning his back on a woman inside and looking out over a pebbled, carefully raked driveway, are these words: "And so the evenings stretched out before him: still, gray, and gravel-strewn."

Beneath a photograph of a man and woman in bed together -- he reading Bill Buford's "Heat" in paperback, she with her eyes half-closed, a blue rotary phone on his bedside table and a pink one on hers: "There are some things that can't be learned from a book."

And under a picture of a man sitting at a dining table, looking pleadingly at the camera, while behind him another male figure can be seen -- through a latticed wooden screen -- walking up a flight of stairs: "Everyone always leaves."

A few designers and design writers have pointed out that the word "hipsters" in the title strikes the wrong note, and I can't say I disagree: How many hipsters, as the term is generally thrown around, can afford to commission a house from Marmol Radziner or Jeanne Gang, whose work the site features? Meanwhile, they are also busy taking bets -- via Twitter (where @unhappyhipsters now has more than 5,000 followers), Facebook and e-mail -- on the identity of Unhappy Hipsters' creators.

Some fans have read every little change to the stripped-down format like a bunch of tea leaves. Did it mean something when the site began to include photographs from magazines other than Dwell, including one from (of all places) Portland Monthly?

And what about the decision to start adding photo credits alongside the captions? I'm sure Dwell photographers, or their lawyers, fired off some threatening correspondence. But doesn't the whole DIY, guerrilla-satire thing lose a little punch when you start worrying about doing the right thing?

When I e-mailed the address listed on the site, asking whether the authors wanted to reveal themselves, I got this reply:  "We'd like to stay anonymous. But we can tell you this: Unhappy Hipsters is a place to finally say what we've all been thinking: 'Oh, miserable modernist -- you picked the concrete floors and the gravel yard; at least pretend you like it.' "

Fair enough. I have my guesses, but I'll keep them to myself.

The site's sudden popularity suggests that image-based satire is a form particularly well-suited for the Web -- Unhappy Hipsters would work beautifully on the iPad -- and that Twitter, with its unbending 140-character limit, may be sharpening our collective caption-writing skills.

It can also be seen as a sign of the speed with which the Web's viral phenomena wax and wane these days. It somehow seems entirely reasonable to speak nostalgically of the site's early period, all of a week ago, when it was sending its best work out into a relative void.

Once the seal was broken on the Unhappy Hipsters vacuum -- once the world noticed -- it was only a matter of time before its crisp satire started to droop a little, as it has in the last few days. The focus has also begun to drift away from residential architecture, with the addition this week of a picture showing an academic building at Caltech by Frederick Fisher & Partners.

That seems odd: a kind of claustrophobia unique to domestic settings is what gives Unhappy Hipsters much of its kick. In the site's world, the transparency that modern architecture is known for turns every living room into a fishbowl. Emotionally speaking, the open plan is an open wound.

Source:  http://articles.latimes.com/print/2010/feb/06/home/la-hm-hipsters6-2010feb06