1. Brew coffee at 2-3X normal strength
2. Fill a small bucket with ice water
3. Fill a tall metal drinking cup with ice and put it in the bucket. You may need to hold the cup down so it doesn’t float
4. Slowly pour the iced coffee into the cup

The metal will conduct the heat quickly away from the cup and into the ice water bath. You should go from scorching hot coffee to cold iced coffee in under 30 seconds, with minimal melting of the interior ice cubes.

If you take your iced coffee with milk or cream, try soy milk instead, even if you aren’t vegan. Trust me.

From 1955 to 1992, the Gaebler Children’s Center in Waltham, MA served the severely mentally ill children referred to the Metropolitan State Hospital. It closed due to budgetary reasons and as part of the general trend away from institutionalization. Today it sits on a large parcel of state-owned land which includes not just the hospital grounds but also numerous walking trails and nature preserves.

It was not a nice place to be a teenager.

A couple of years ago I opened an account on istockphoto.com. Stock photography websites are (correctly) accused of devaluing stock photography in general, as every jerk with a DSLR can flood the market with lousy pictures with poor white balance and make $.01 per download. I am one of those jerks.

I have earned about $200 in sales from istockphoto, and the vast majority has been from a single photo of coffee beans I shot against some cardstock in my bathroom. Here it is:

It’s not even a good photo, but it’s been paid for 332 times — earning about a fourth of the cost of the lens that took the picture. Recently it occurred to me that my contract with istockphoto is non-exclusive, so if people want to insert my coffee bean photo into their PowerPoint presentations I should allow them to purchase it from a variety of vendors.

I signed up to be a photographer on Shutterstock and submitted the required 10 photographs, including the wildly popular coffee bean photo. Shutterstock indicated that they would review my initial set and get back to me in 2 to 7 days.

Four hours later, all ten photographs were rejected.

So if you are looking for a high-quality stock photography site, may I suggest http://www.shutterstock.com?