Courtesy of Boing Boing (it's this little blog you should check out sometime), we discovered that Radar Online -- a.k.a. the magazine that refuses to die -- has an interview with Winter, a 34-year-old freelance computer programmer who has made it his life's mission to visit every Starbucks in the world. That's 12,000 and counting. An excerpt:

The primary rule is I have to drink at least one four-ounce sample of caffeinated coffee from each store. The store has to have actually opened for business; I can't get there the day before, when they have friends-and-family day and they're giving drinks away—in many ways that's kind of arbitrary. It has to be a company-owned store, not a licensed store. I have to drink the coffee, but there is no time limit on when I have to drink the coffee. But the longer I go without drinking it, the greater the risk that I might lose it. There are two stores I need to go back to in Washington State because I didn't finish the coffee—I lost it. I took it out of the store, I had it in a cup, and in the middle of the night I forgot I hadn't drank it all and I used the cup to relieve myself. more ›