Starry Wisdom

I took a few minutes during lunch to install the Disqus commenting system, on a whim. Let’s see how it goes…

They say you should wait until later at night to shop, because it will be less busy. Well, we went at 9PM, and it was still busy. Also, they were out of bananas :(.

They also say to not shop hungry, because you’ll buy too much stuff. Well I was stuffed from dinner and still got 2 boxes of microwave popcorn, and a 20 pack of bags of sunchips and…

Basically, grocery shopping rules of thumb are BOGUS.

For years now, I made coffee at home with a Moka pot – the little Italian ‘stove top espresso’ maker that’s been in use in Italy since the 1930s. This makes pretty decent coffee usually, but I have been known to burn it on occasion from not paying attention, and the volume of coffee produced isn’t very much.

Enter the Chemex:

(Please pardon the moving boxes etc, Mackenzie moved into my flat last weekend and we hadn’t had time to unpack her kitchen stuff when I took these pictures)

This is another old coffee technology, made from bits of laboratory glass fused together into a single, quite striking, functional piece. Making coffee is fairly simple, but there are multiple steps. This process is basically like single-cup drip from places like Philz or Blue Bottle, etc.

1. Start boiling water.
2. Grind your beans (unless they are preground). This is the trickiest step, I think – I’m still trying to get the right grind. I guess working with a blade grinder is not ideal, but I can’t justify a burr grinder – maybe that can be another post someday.
3. Put a paper filter (chemex makes special ones that are ‘optimal’ for the device – I’m not sure I 100% buy into this yet, but I got some of them so, I’m using them) into your Chemex.
4. After the kettle boils, turn off the stove. Pour a small bit of water to wet the filter (and to warm the carafe if it’s cold!) into the carafe. Pour this water out into the sink.
5. Put your ground coffee into the filter.



6. Put a small amount of hot water into the grounds, just enough to make them wet. Wait 30 seconds or so – this will ‘bloom’ the coffee and help the brewing process.
7. Slowly pour the appropriate amount of the hot (no longer boiling) water over the grounds, it will filter through the grinds and the cone filter at the proper rate to ensure ‘perfect extraction’ of coffee flavors.



Yes, it is a bit fidly, and it’s not a way to make a quick cup of coffee before work, but the coffee that it does produce is fantastically tasty – smooth and well-balanced. I’ll note that I am using some Kona beans that are probably no longer super fresh, and as I said before, my grinding is not really optimal, and it’s still something I’m playing with. All this being said, it is definitely the best coffee I’ve ever made at home. Plus, the Chemex pot itself just looks damn cool!

I plan to play with some different beans this month, and my technique in general – I’ll try to post some future observations and updates as I learn more, but I welcome comments and suggestions!

Yes, I am cheating and back dating a post, because I didn’t have a chance to finish my Chemex post which I should finish tonight and make for the official Sunday post.

Anyway, I wanted to talk about a really interesting story I heard on the Radiolab podcast. Radiolab is a Public Radio show, not too dissimilar to This American Life, but the stories are more targeted towards science. It’s also very highly ‘produced’, since one of the hosts seems to be fascinated with that. Anyway, it’s an interesting show and I recommend downloading and listening to some of it.

Back to the point of this post – in the latest podcast, there is a story about a young woman who was hit by an 18 wheeler while riding her bicycle in New York. I don’t want to give too much away, but I will say that the story is uplifting despite the dire start of it. I recommend taking twenty minutes or so to listen to Finding Emilie.

Au Revoir Simone is a band named after a throw-away line in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. They make catchy, poppy music. Knight of Wands is my cell phone’s default ringtone, and they made a fun coloring book video for it:

You’d think that someone who works in the computer networking industry would have an easier time with their home network. And maybe I would if it weren’t for pesky game consoles. Just a note, this is rambly and a bit technical, so be warned. Also note that so far I am completely failing at writing about the cool topics I mentioned at the end of January – but I am also still soliciting more topics to write about…

Ok, to be honest, I started typing this out because there was a problem getting Mackenzie’s Wii connected to my wireless network, but then I recalled that you can actually mess with the network settings by non-intuitively clicking around – and of course that the Wii only supports AES for WPA2, which is OK, i guess. Anyway, I got it worked out but that’s the least of my worries.

Because my more modern Xbox360 also has problems with the wireless – in that it often refuses to believe the network exists, even though other devices have no problems. I can watch Netflix perfectly on my laptop, 10 feet further away from the WAP than the Xbox is. And the Xbox, when it can watch Netflix often scales the movies down to the lowest quality. If I plug it in via a long ethernet cable, HD all the way.

So, I have a tentative plan to buy another WRT54GL, put dd-wrt on it (which is what I am running on the current router), and set it up as a wireless bridge/repeater to get more coverage in the flat – which isn’t all that big. I’m hoping that maybe it can keep a more solid connection to the main router than the silly Xbox. Plus the wireless signal in the bedroom (which is the farthest room from the office) is pretty weak anyway – so maybe having another signal on this side of the flat will help? Or at least I can run a shorter cable to the Xbox maybe. I don’t know, but a router is only $50, and if it’s useless, I can ebay it with the bonus of the aftermarket OS already installed!

Stick with it, I guarantee a payoff!

Ok, so we all know that the weather out there is pretty crazy in Chicago (where I am from) right now. A blizzard the like of which hasn’t been seen for decades – my brother was a bit confused and wasn’t sure if it was the third biggest snowfall after ’67 and ’79 or if ’99 (which I was present for) also beat it. Either way, they got a lot of snow:

My family’s cars were trapped for the day for various reasons, which I guess was OK because most work and school was cancelled. My brother told me that he took Milo, my nephew out on the shoveled path to the garage and the snow was completely over his head. There is video of this which I hope to see in the near future, but now we’ll all have to just live with the cute mental picture of an 18th month old kid, bundled in a snowsuit, and surrounded by walls of white powder.

Yes, I sure am glad I live in California and don’t have to put up with this sort of weather.

However, I am sort of sad that I didn’t get to experience Thundersnow. My friend Katie tells me it is common in Kansas City, but it seems to be a novel occurrence elsewhere in the nation.

Meanwhile, I got to contend with what was an outrageously sunny day for San Bruno, where I work. Rats!

Ok, now as a reward for those that made it this far, I know present what very well could be the greatest commercial of the decade (which is only about a month old…):

P.S. The amount of wrangling I had to do to get videos that didn’t bleed like crazy over the right column makes me believe it’s about time for a new blog layout.

I’ll ease in to this blog-a-day with a quit bit of kvetching.

On my drive in to work today, my midback decided to spasm on me. This did not, and does not feel good! I helped Mackenzie move into my flat on Saturday, and maybe this is some 3 day delayed outcome from that? Or maybe it’s related to spending a total of 2 hours on airplanes yesterday flying back and forth from Burnbank – that dirty air is no good for you. Shrug.

Either way, I want a new back ASAP.