Sad news from BoingBoing this morning: Anita Rowland, the blogmother of the Seattle blog meetups and a longtime Internet presence, has passed away at the age of 51. Her cancer finally overcame her indomitable personal strength.

I’ll always remember Anita for putting out a welcoming hand when I first started trying to find my way in the greater Seattle community outside Microsoft. I can only hope that she’s welcomed upstairs with half the hospitality she offered everyone who met her.

If you ever met Anita, or if you ever knew anyone who had cancer and no health insurance, please consider making a contribution to her medical fund as a memorial.

Early start to the morning today, with a presentation that ran from 8 to noon Pacific time (I have been in Seattle for a business trip since yesterday afternoon). And then? Driving back into Seattle with KEXP on the car radio. A relatively leisurely afternoon spent checking email, working on proposals, catching up on status with the home office. And, um, lunch (rock shrimp tacos!) with a beer or two at the Hilltop Ale House.

Now at SeaTac (viva!) after making my way through an absurdly long security line, waiting for my red-eye flight back. And sitting at (drumroll) an Anthony’s, just the other side of aforementioned absurdly long security line, with a Deschutes Black Butte Porter and a plate of oysters on the way.

As a very wise man once said, who can say I am not/the happy genius of my household?

This was an amazingly quick trip; we landed at SeaTac (Viva SeaTac!) at 12 and were at our customer’s site in Tacoma at 1:30; headed to dinner at 5; watched Tennessee lose to Ohio State (sorry, Kelsey); and now I’m up, listening to the KEXP stream and sipping French press coffee in my room and getting ready to drive back to SeaTac (Viva SeaTac!).

We had dinner last night, at the recommendation of our prospect, at the Anthony’s Seafood at Federal Way. It’s closer in decor to the Anthony’s Homeport in Kirkland than the one at Pier 66, but the food was excellent. I steered the table in the direction of some fresh-caught Alaskan halibut, then had a moment of indecision and ended up getting salmon with a fresh Dungeness crab cake. The salmon was just OK—not really the right season for it’but the crab cake was nirvana. We also had some oysters, which I could have made a meal of by themselves given a free hand with the expenses.

Hotel 1000 turned out to be fairly amazing. My sales director came down blinking after dropping his things off in his room last night, saying that it was just like some of the boutique hotels he had stayed in in New York. For my part, the shower was amazing; the wired Ethernet was great (and included in the room price, as it should be); the aforementioned French press coffee a small bit of nirvana. My only complaint is that the wireless was too slow... and that we had to leave so soon. Ah well.

I’m back in the air today. On the agenda: a meeting in Tacoma. It will be the first time I’ve been back in the Puget Sound area since I left on my cross country trip in 2004.

I’m looking forward to our overnight stay at Hotel 1000 in Seattle. I never spent much time near Pioneer Square, but I know the area around the hotel and it should be entertaining to introduce my coworkers to the sight of the Lusty Lady sitting cheek by jowl with all the other more family-friendly attractions in that part of town.

Synchronicity is coffee related blog posts from both Doc Searls and Blogorelli arriving in one’s aggregator on the same day. Granted, it was Tuesday; I’m a little behind.

Anyway: first Doc Searls pointed out Howard Schultz’s mail to his troops about how Starbucks’s growth has endangered the customer experience in its stores. Doc further opines that the “milking down” of the experience has endangered the core product.

I would concur: I thought the chain was in trouble from a soul perspective ever since, in the late 1990s, it started heavily promoting Frappucinos. Why? Because a Frappucino is a lot of ice, sugar, and milk with coffee flavoring; it’s not really a coffee drink. I believe at the time it was a creative response to a short term supply constraint (there was a big spike in coffee prices at the time), but over time the milk has drowned the coffee. Nasty-ass flavored lattés are just the logical evolution.

Still, there’s part of me that pauses when I read Doc’s recommendations. One is to “go back to real commercial espresso machines. Too many Starbucks now feature automated machines that any idiot can use. I don't know what you call these things, but they are made to move customers through faster...” I pause when I read this, because I’m the guy who gets nervous when there are more than two people ahead of him in line at Starbucks and the line is not moving. Yesterday in the airport, in fact, there were two “baristas” (neither of whom would last a second in Seattle), who were each taking and then filling their own orders—no division of labor, no checking ahead to get drinks for the next person in line—and it took forever to get through and get my coffee. Why can’t that be sped up?

Because, of course, if you want quick coffee you don’t get to cavil about the quality of the preparation experience, or ask for the company to put in slower machines. But if you want fast coffee, why not just get McDonalds to do it? The answer is, of course, we all want to feel special, like we have a personal relationship with our coffee. What’s the best thing about going to Starbucks regularly? That the barista knows who you are and starts making your drink when you walk in the door. That is such the opposite of the mass market experience. So is the fact that I expect Starbucks to be clean, the employees to be intelligent and lively, and the other customers to be professionals. So maybe my expectations for Starbucks are classist?

Something else comes into the mix, of course: Blogorelli points to the newest East Coast trend of high service espresso bars, featuring ristretto shots, freshly roasted beans, and (most visibly) foam art on the lattes. (The article doesn’t mention it, but really good baristas can do a leaf pattern in the crema on top of a plain espresso shot even without any cream.) Having experienced this in Seattle four years ago, I can say it’s a pretty amazing difference from Starbucks and is clearly where the leading edge customer is going. So the question is, can Starbucks follow this customer?

Put another way, there are two markets for coffee drinkers: those who love coffee, and everyone else. Can Starbucks really continue to try to serve both? Or will its efforts continue to disorder its brand until it loses all momentum and is overtaken by another competitor?