Coffee Crone: Taming Coffee Blog

October 16 2006

RT is a network guy. By that I mean he is responsible for the health and welfare of a gazillion dollars worth of computer equipment running off of multiple servers and doing all sorts of complicated things. He is also an accountant, which I am telling you only so that you will understand that he is generally inclined to be a stickler for details.

All of this somehow becomes irrelevant the moment he walks through our front door.

This was made clear, once again, as we worked together to install a TiVo in our home. We purchased the TiVo shortly after RT ran up the stairs from our office/family room with a $39 VCR under each arm and threw them in the garbage. It is a measure of how disgusted he was that he did this strange thing just as the new fall season was getting underway. I should probably mention that he is addicted to TV and routinely tapes everything but Project Runway, Good Eats, and Dawg, the Bounty Hunter.

In any case, until recently, TiVo has not been available in Canada without some hacking of a system bought in the states. Even now, when you activate a TiVo here you have to pretend to be from Leo, Wyoming during the first part of the set-up.

Did I mention that RT was nekkid when he ran up the stairs with the VCRs? Well, he was.

After he got dressed and went to work, I figured out that we could buy a TiVo, and pay for three years of programming, for less than our cable company charges to purchase their PVR. And after we bought it from Big Cable, we would have to pay an extra $20 a month to use the damn thing. Buying the TiVo somehow became a remarkably sane thing to do.

The TiVo arrived yesterday. I called RT at work, no doubt interrupting him as he was busily administering the gazillion dollars worth of computers, and asked him if he wanted me to set it up. He said something equivalent to "Don't bother your pretty little head." So, I didn't. I knew I should have, but I had errands to run and coffee to roast so I left it for the man of the house, the network guy, all the while knowing that we would have many of what in our house are called "Jesus Murphy" moments before the system was up and running.

I know a whole lot less than he does about setting up computer networks, and we were going to add the TiVo to the one in our house, so leaving it up to him was not a bad thing. I knew we needed CAT 5 cable, so I went out and got a bunch of it. I even checked to see that we had room in the router for another connection. I also read widely on the TiVo site, printed out various things I thought might be helpful, and underlined in red the things I was pretty sure Ron would skip right over—like the part about Leo, Wyoming.

All in all, he did fairly well. There were hardly any Jesus Murphy moments, and, at the end of the night, we could record TV shows. There were problems like the TiVo not really being on our network and the on-line scheduling thinking we really lived in Wyoming, but it's not like the machine didn't work.

I've been married to RT just long enough to know that I should either silently fix them later, or at least wait until I had figured out some possible solutions for him to take care of in his manly way. I'm pretty good at that last part.

After dinner, using my sweetest girlie voice, I asked him if he could tweak the system a bit for me, saying things like, "I'm not sure, honey, but would it help any if the IP address on the TiVo and the IP address on our router were the same?", followed by, "Is it possible the IP address wouldn't change when you refresh if you set a MAC address on the router, too?".

Seventeen Jesus Murphies later, we really are good to go. He now has set up season passes for a whole bunch of his shows, and I came downstairs in the middle of the night to set one up for Good Eats. I figure I'll deal with Project Runway and Dawg after the listing of recorded shows gets long enough for him to skip right over them like the insignificant details they really are.

posted by taming at 22:48 | link | comments (1)|
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October 7 2006

High Maintenenace

When I was younger, say in high school, and mebbe even through my twenties and thirties, I was a low maintenance kinda gal. The only frou-frou thing I owned was lemon scented cream rinse. My how times have changed.

At 54, it's not just that my body related maintenance needs have mysteriously multiplied, but other aspects of my life seem to need the constant fiddling and adjustment that I associate with high maintenance. The truth of this really hit home yesterday.

You see once every four weeks, I have my nails done. I'm not just talking polish here either, but the whole nine yards beginning with a drive to a shop inhabited by a gaggle of tiny women who speak just enough English to apply acrylic nails and wax eyebrows, but prefer speaking Vietnamese amongst themselves, as if their customers didn't really exist. My appointment is always at noon on a Friday. I make it for noon because the shop owner turns the heat off overnight, and if you get there earlier in the day, during the winter, you risk having icicles form in your nose.

That's not the whole truth. Even if the shop owner believed in overnight heating, I wouldn't go in until noonish because I begin nail day by colouring my hair. I use henna to do this, and it is the messiest thing you can imagine. The henna I use comes in hard blocks, that must be broken apart with a hammer, and then grated into a bowl. You add boiling water to it, mix it up, place that bowl in another bowl of hot water to keep it warm, and then apply this slimy goo to your hair. It has to stay there for an hour. There are easier kinds of henna available, but, somehow, it's just not the same.

I am aware that it just might be that it takes the kind of person who roasts her own coffee to see the difference.

Half of the time I end up with green nails, which is why I do it right before my nail appointment. I end up with a huge mess in my kitchen all of the time, which is why nail day is not just henna day, but clean the kitchen really well day, too.

Yesterday, in addition to my every four week hair and nail maintenance tasks (we won't go into the moisturizing, showering, and examining my corporeal self for new wrinkles and brown spots that are part of the daily routine in my world these days), I had major computer maintenance things to deal with.

Yes, I admit it, I use Microsoft Windows. I tried Apple, really I did, back before IBM rolled out it's first PC. I had the most marvelous Apple II with a whole 16 k of memory. I even upgraded to a IIe, when it was released a couple of years later. My, how I loved that machine. I went over to the dark side when the first of the 386 processors were rolled out, and never really regretted it. I'm just not kewl enough for a MAC.

In any case, as the years went by, just as I somehow went from lemon scented cream rinse to an entire closet full of body maintenance tools, I've incrementally added routines and processes to maintain my windows based computer. I have almost all of them automated, but as I just got a new machine, I had to start from scratch, and install all of the products that working "clean" within a Window's environment requires.

The need to clean, scrub, delete and adjust new machines starts within seconds of turning it on for the first time. After the joy of a truly fast boot-up passes, the first thing one must do is make sure you have working anti-virus and spyware tools, before you go online for the first time. The second thing you do is uninstall the crap that comes on mass market machines, like the HP I bought. And because you are uninstalling, this has to be followed by running a registry cleaner (and heaven forbid, not the one that comes with Windows) that gets out all the crappola that Window's uninstaller leaves behind. And let's not forget defragging (again, not with the one Mr. Gates provides).

By the time you get everything you need installed (including programs, settings from your old computer, rules for your mail, address book, cookies, yada yada) and everything you don't want uninstalled, all the joy of having a new machine is sucked right out of you.

It's just one more thing that you have to maintain.

posted by taming at 15:19 | link | comments (1)|
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October 4 2006

No Coffee Here, Nope

I smell like sesame seeds. That's a good thing, right?

It's a dry skin thing, well that an addiction to Lush products, that is hard to break. This is something called Skin Drink. You know that your sexpot days are over when smelling like sesame seeds is better than risking dry skin.

At least it took fifty plus years for me to get this way. The amazingly ugly fellow (and I am betting he is not much better when disguised as a man) in this Shakira spoof video (found on google) is waaay beyond the kind of help a moisturizer provides.

What do you want to bet that he's the kind of guy who makes rude remarks about women who are ten pounds overweight?

posted by taming at 10:46 | link | comments (2)|
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October 3 2006

Catching Up

I didn't die, or abandon my weblog; it's just been a crazy-making month. I was out of the country for a bit, recovering from being out of the country for a bit longer, and then in the middle of a computer meltdown, for what seemed like ages, but was really only about half a bit.

Life is calm now, or, at least, as calm as it gets around here.

The coffee here is very good, in fact, so good, that I think I found our standard house brew. Not that I am going to stop ordering all sorts of other beans, but I think I found something I will always want to have on hand. Fortunately, it is Moka Kadir, one of the Sweet Maria blends, so I should never have problems getting it. Here is some of what what Tom has to say about it:

Notes: This is a powerful blend of coffees from the Red Sea area, from Yemeni coffees on one side, and Ethiopian coffees on the other. I intended for the exotic espresso shot or filtered coffee. It incorporates three excellent Dry-Processed coffees that contribute to a huge body, strong bittersweet chocolate roast-taste, and intense fruity aromatics. Since all are Dry-Processed and have nearly equivalent identities and moisture contents, this an acceptable pre-roast blend (as opposed to blending coffees after roasting them separately). None these coffees roast to a uniform color individually, which is part of their character and complexity in the cup. My purpose here is to offer a precisely blended coffee I love, and save you from buying the coffees separately. The Yemeni, Sidamo and Ghimbi coffees we use for our Moka Kadir are stocked just for the blend, which makes it hard (well, impossible) for you to recreate this though; and I feel the coffees need to be pre-blended and equalize moisture content with each other, something that works well in large batches.

It is just on the edge of being too cold to roast outside, meaning I can do it, but whilst wearing a coat. I love my iRoast2, but I am really so much happier with my bread machine heat gun set up. It's a control thing. Well, that and the joy of roasting bigger quantities. I roasted inside this AM, with one of the beans I got as part of the recently purchased SM sample pack. I don't want to wait to try it, but as it is a So. American bean, I will force myself to wait for a few days. The Moka Kadir tastes great the day after I roast, and stays that way until I run out of beans (usually 5 days later), which makes it a terrific bean for bigger batch roasting. An IR2 batch lasts about two days at our house.

Leaving the land of coffee for a bit, we are eagerly awaiting the delivery of our TiVo. Getting one in Canada has been a hassle, with some minor hacking needed to actually get it to work here. And while you still can't go into a store and just pick one off the shelves, you can order one from a Canadian source and just set it up like the Americans do. It was shipped out yesterday (following a week delay) and it should be here in time for the big guy to play with it this weekend.

It's been a rotten time to be without a VCR or other recorder, though I have made do with various things available over the Internet. RT won't watch TV in my media player window, but I will. On the plus side, I will have all of the episodes of season 4 of Corner Gas on my machine and can burn them to DVD for my Ozzie friend who waits and waits for the new seasons to be available on a commercial DVD. I don't feel even slightly guilty for recording "free" TV, after all, I am not taking money from some poor starving artist. Yup, I hear you Weird Al.

That said, rock on Azureus.

Welcome to winter

posted by taming at 07:22 | link | comments (3)|
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