MAX

MAX
8pounds 1.7ounces
June 28, 2005
4:07PM Pacific

Sorry no picture yet but he's already proving himself to be as cool as B-Dog. He's one skinny strong guy. His legs are already TDF grade strong. It took me forever to muscle past those legs to install the tiniest little diaper. Pics up soon.

Max & Amy are recovering nicely. I, however, am in a dire state from lack of sleep and good coffee. In other words... I am a wuss. amen.

Taking espresso to an entirely insane level. Yes the analysis has begun. You can expect even better drinks from the cafe. 

This gauge might is akin to an EKG where a zero reading = flatline. Given we're near the green, the cafe's alive and the patrons are delighted! Happy day 

unplanned expenses

The Volvo died with a potential up to $2000 repair bill. It has been 100% dependable until Thursday when it did something ugly. I made it home and successfully drove it to the repair shop but things were dire. Sadly the repair logic is as follows:

If cost of repair + predicted future repairs is [less than] value of car [minus] value of car in broken state [then] one logically must do the repair.

I.e $2000 + 0 < $4500 - ~$1000

The broken state value is calculated in to introduce the option of simply walking away from the car selling it to the shop for parts. The difficulty in predicting future repairs is also an uncomfortable guess. The one extremely frustrating fact that this calculation applies to TODAY and has nothing to do with yesterday. For example, I get car back this week. Transmission explodes the following Monday for $2500. I need to calculate based upon that repair only. The history may feel relevant but it is not. It might make sense to plug in a default $500 into the future repair field, thus:

$2000 + $500 < $4500 - ~$1000

Still evaluates true.

An independent question is whether the car gets sold after the repair because of the $500 placeholder's variability or the general trust of the machine. Simply put, I trust the 240 volvo to run dependably for a loooong time despite this unfortunate incident.

They're here.... :^) 

REPLY

If you're reading this please take the 15 seconds to post a reply. Use the anonymous option but throw in your name into the reply. On occasion I get, "Yeah, I read that on your blog the other day" but I have no idea what my readership is. I know that I'm certainly wasting time on this thing but I'd like to get an idea of *how* pointless it all is. Thanks.

scarcity & season

Everybody loves blueberry pie. This is a universal truth. Armed with this knowledge I considered the fact that at any given moment, say the dead of winter, I can have a blueberry pie.

Seriously... isn't that great?

Nope

Crazy? Perhaps but there is one thing better than blueberry pie... the anticipation of blueberry pie. It's the scarcity that makes things interesting, makes things worthwhile, makes us actually happy. Having all the stuff all the time isn't really helpful at all. Sure it seems like 27/7/365 access to blueberry pie would be pretty much perfection but it just makes it ordinary.

There's an interesting statistic that wealth has no correlation to happiness in children and adults. There is a minimum threshold to this, abject poverty for example. But beyond that, there is no correlation... none.

There is a particular kind of magic in living within the seasons, waiting for certain produce to be harvested from less than 100 miles away. I explicitly choose to do this which is kind of sad. It would be more interesting if there was some challenge, some effort, some hardship in getting things from faraway lands and items out of season. Climbing to the top of the mountain is one million times more satisfying than pulling over at the scenic overlook for the same view.

Which brings me back to the blueberry pie. The farmer's market is rumored to have blueberries coming soon. But you've got to get up early because they sell out quick.

plumbed!!!!

the machine at the cafe is now hard plumbed meaning water comes directly from the house plumbing versus a little refillable plastic jug thing. With over 40 individual junctions, it was an ugly process. 40 water connections = 40 opportunities for a leak. Then there was the electricity, the pressure settings, the unexplained function, the calls to tech support...

It wasn't pretty. I've been in a particularly foul mood for the past 2+ days as a result. Coffee is one medication that I depend upon to get things done. This is problematic when the thing to get done is fixing/upgrading the machine. I had planned on dialing it at a more leisurely pace but circumstance caused it to become a firefight. It's over now and the cafe and the world is a better place.

"Dude, it's easy"

My first real ride in well over a month. Summitting Mt Tabor is not a real ride and neither is scooting across the river to pick up fresh [coffee] beans.

"There's always a slow guy so it'll be easy"
"But I haven't been riding at all. I've been sick, we've had guests, there has been major reconstruction on the house, I was layed off, I started a new j..."
"Don't worrrrrrrrrrrry. You'll have NO problems."

Well after I crashed and burned 20 miles into a 45 mile ride, I enjoyed the being dragged by the car or, better yet, being pushed along by a 17 year old rider. When I say pushed, I don't mean drafting on his wheel, I mean his hand on my back and pushing me up all the hills.

I think when I got out of the saddle I actually decelerated.

No problem.

Quiet coffee

So I'm a freak.

Not that's out of the way, we can get to it. We all know the espresso machine at the Community Cafe is pretty nice. It is, however, a bit noisy. It also has one issue that under high load, it can run out of water. So there I am entertaining and I've got to refill the thing. Sure this only takes 2 -3 minutes but it breaks the rhythm and flow of it all. I'm trying to bang out drinks and the last thing I need is to have to stop everything. The milk gets cold, the shot is ruined. Don't even ASK if I can reheat the milk. Yes I can but I won't. We have standards here at the cafe.

So those issues are all going away. I'm investing in a proper installation for the machine. Currently what we have is a plastic reservour and a thing called a vibration pump. That little vp can crank out the 9 bar of pressure but it does this by ... well... vibrating as frantically and noisily as possible. The vibe pump and the reservour will be retired, to be replaced by some heavy hardware. Enter the rotary pump and hard plumbed system.

The nearly silent pump will hide under the sink and connect directly to the house water supply. In line filtering will also be added. This stuff aint cheap and the cost for this conversion alone is well more than a decent home espresso machine but the overall effect will be fantastic. Oh and we'll be connecting a drain system as well.

The end solution will be a simplification of the process, a quieter operation, and an ability to build drinks one after the other. So what drives this insanity? Well insanity of course but the real thing is the desire to legitimize the cafe. If one were to walk into 1000 home kitchens they'd probably find pretty much the same core items: Frig, range, dishwasher, sink. The only other items tend to be toys. Plastic toaster, crappy coffee maker, blender, etc. Everybody seems to put the appliances in their home based on unwritten code. The code says you must do things in a certain way and here are your priorities. I've never seen anyone with a, for example, separate wok burner with 30,000 btu's. It's not because it's a bad idea, it just goes against the code. For some people that would be a pointless thing but for others, it might be positively ideal. I may come across as a nut-job. Not only have I blown some serious coin for the cafe setup, I'm now taking it to another level. I may be insane but I'm happy to have broken the code.

The photo is not technically good {exposure, focus} but there's something I like about the overexposure & the boy's expression. It reminds me of the cult of Holga photographers. ((If you have no idea what I'm talking about, throw "Holga" into google.)) 

We've cooked *nothing* for many weeks. After nearly dying from overexposure to tater tots and pizza....Finally, I put something together. And in the nick of time. Who's Nick? 

This thing is INSANE. Even with this photo it is hard to grasp how tiny it actually is. Within this tiny case are 107 songs (& it is not maxed out) an amplifier that produces impressive sound and power for 10 hours of music. It doesn't seem real. truly sweet. 

May the Farm be with you

Good stuff
http://www.storewars.org/flash/index.html
Turn your sound up

the right thing to do

i have little choice but to post a blog entry now. You see I'm sitting at a superb Portland cafe doing work (ok not at this exact second). So in the name of being hip and connected and dialed into the scene... here I am. The magic moment happened as I paused to think and my eyes landed on a poster on the wall. Some local musical folk acoustic artist. That wasn't super cool but what I did next was kinda dialed. I keyed her web address {http://www.brendaweiler.com} and had a quick look.

It's good to get out every once in a while. Running on battery so I'll be working for 64%, or for an additional 2 hours 14 minutes. No wires.

I'm IN

So this world of media technology... it's all destined for the landfill so I avoid much of it. Plus the cutting edge stuff is always expensive and rarely worth it. We're less than three year vetarans of the DVD player and it is a modest system at that.

So I've touched my toe into another world of technology with the smallest cheapest unit: the iPod shuffle. The purpuse was to replace the skipping CD player that allows us to ride around with Benjamin in the sidecar bike trailer. Without music, his endurance drops and we can't get to where we want to go.

But before the iPod actually arrives, I'm transitioning from the old cd based paradigm and entering an entirely more fluid way of considering music. Most technically savvy people have already uploaded their music library but here I am getting on board in short order. I can't wait to begin building up the playlists. Even without the little player, the movement of music from physical media to computer is liberating. I've already bought and downloaded the latest from Cake & Dave Matthews without anything physical. No paper for the transaction and nothing but a data stream to show for it. I finally enter the new century... five years late.

like a lion

Benjamin says that a thunderstorm sounds like a lion. Ben likes thunderstorms. The weather radar shows a thunderstorm heading towards Portland right now. Ben's happy about that.

screwed

This is a statement directed at all manufacturers who spec crappy hardware. Hey I paid a lot of money for product X, please... PLEASE throw down the extra 7c to put in a decent set of screws and such. Stripped broken screws, hollow tin wing-nuts, it's all just sad and wrong and turns installation into a frustrating pain.

Props to IKEA... those guys throw in solid machined pieces and everything is a joy to construct. OK joy may be a stretch but for the rest of you... be more like IKEA.

ok then.

bad coffee part II

This rant will be {kinda} brief. So one obvious reason that espresso is, on the whole, not made very well is because the staff doesn't know what they're doing. To mitigate this, the owner needs to either hire better staff or take the intelligence out of the equation. Hence Starbucks move to full automatic machines. A machine made coffee is like a machine built bicycle wheel. It works but the handmade is much nicer in the right hands.

So I decide to get an espresso with my gelato last pm and they have semi automatic machines. This means that the flow of water handled by pressing a button with an icon for one cup, two cups, etc. I order a double and she puts a cappucino cup {error #1, cup way too big} under the spouts. She grinds and hits the #2 button. All is well and what's coming out actually looks quite good. She peers into the cup and then....

... presses the button again.

"Noooooooooo" I say frantically, "that's good. That's good. I'll take it as is." She's not happy but it's hard to care. They dumbed down the system so the staff wouldn't make errors and then staff goes out of their way to make a huge error. She would have turned a decent drink into a puddle of nasty bitter dreck.

[Footnote] One might call me extremely particular (not a compliment) that I would notice or care about the cup size but, hey... it does. An espresso is a delicate fleeting thing. It tastes decidedly better within the first 45 seconds of its life and degrades rapidly. It's best to finish it inside of 3-4 minutes. To speed up its death, put it in a cold big cup and it's already sub optimal and not nearly as hot even before you get it. So there it is. If you go to a top notch cafe, you'll notice that they preheat the tiny cup with hot water and you tend to get your espresso without even a moment's delay. As the last dribble lands, they're handing it to you. That's because they get it.

So much for this being short. :^S

Everybody's been asking about them so here they are roosting for the evening. The old expression is true, they *always* come back to roost. 2-1/2 months old, aka eggs minus 3-1/2...tick tock.