Coffee and Politics

I have been a roasting fool for the past few days. I suppose, if one must be a fool, this is about as good as it gets.

We have been blessed with unexpected company who are appreciative of good coffee and drink a whole lot of it. Fortunately, the weather has been cooperative, so bread machine/heat gun roasting in our unheated garage is doable. I have to wave the heat gun round a bit to warm up the bread machine before it will turn on, but that's not a biggie.

I was also lucky to have a decent sized stash of beans that don't require much in the way of rest before they can be brewed. The garage floor is covered with chaff (somehow whilst it is warm enough to roast, it doesn't seem warm enough to sweep), but we can live with that for another few months.

The simple life of a homeroaster.

My stove has died, well, only the oven part is kaput, but we are looking at buying a new one. When I told RT that when we bought a new stove, I also wanted to buy a really good exhaust fan and vent it to the outside, he seemed to realize that this last part was more about roasting coffee inside the house than it was about roasting meat in the oven. We do have a working oven in our lower level, so all is not lost, it's just inconvenient.

Actually, the installation will be a major part of the expense as I want to get a gas cook top, and we will have to have a gas line run. And then we will have to figure out how to properly vent the fan. Our current fan is not vented. All it does is disperse the smoke throughout the kitchen. Our smoke detector gets a lot of use.

Rereading this, I now realize I have to write something non-coffee related, lest I drive away folks who could not care less about the topic. Here it is:

When I first heard the chatter about the urmmm, roughness, of Stephane Dion's English, all I could think was that he probably speaks better English than George Bush. For the non-Canadians, Dion is the new leader of the Liberal Party. We also have a new leader of the Alberta Progressive Conservatives. He is said to be "nice". After all those years of King Ralph, that is a welcome change.

 

posted by taming at 06:36 | link | comments (1)|
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I'm (sorta) Canadian. My Garage Door Still Works

From the Chicago Tribune: (via SlashDot)

DENVER -- What do remote-control garage door openers have to do with national security? A secretive Air Force facility in Colorado Springs tested a radio frequency this past week that it would use to communicate with first responders in the event of a homeland security threat. But the frequency also controls an estimated 50 million garage door openers, and hundreds of residents in the area found that theirs had suddenly stopped working.

and...

Technically, the Air Force has the right to the frequency, which it began using nearly three years ago at some bases. Signals have previously interfered with garage doors near bases in Florida, Maryland and Pennsylvania.

In general, effects from the transmissions would be felt only within 10 miles, but the Colorado Springs signal is beamed from atop 6,184-foot Cheyenne Mountain, which likely extends the range.

Holly Strack, who lives near the entrance to the facility, said friends in the neighborhood all had the same problem.

"I never thought my garage door was a threat to national security," she said.

 

posted by taming at 06:48 | link | comments (1)|
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Note This Big Brother: The Jack is for Fruitcake

I'm listening to/building my on-line radio station using Pandora. It's an odd mixture of folk rock and bluesy sounding female pop artists.

It's linked to my gmail Email account. And my mail from that account is stored on-line. I may just be in denial, or I guess I might be a 50 something slacker, but I don't spend much time worrying that someone in the government, or some representative from Google Gone Wild, might come after me based on some inference they might make when they combine data sets and figure out that I like to listen to both Alicia Keys and Bob Dylan and that I get Email from the Alberta NDP.

Everyone has my phone number. Data sets built on that connector will reveal what I buy at the grocery store, the movies I rent from Blockbusters, my prescription history, the books I borrow from the library, and the exact number of bottles of Jack Daniels that are consumed in this household. And whilst on some level, I'd like to request that an entry be made reflecting the fact that I only use Jack in fruitcake and the rest of the Jack consumption in this household is RT's, mostly I don't worry about that either.

Back in the 60s, when some of Bob Dylan's music seemed sacred to me, I was more anonymous in my everyday life, and much more concerned about perceived threats to my privacy.

Some of that was the more or less common paranoia of anyone who, like me, was involved in the anti-war movement. At meetings, we looked for strangers who might be government agents, and no doubt they were there, at least occasionally. We worried as we signed all sorts of petitions and we tried to ignore the cameras trained on us at protests. We were suspicious, and we were suspect.

It came with the territory. After all, from the government's perspective, anti-war activists were dangerous. A decade earlier, we'd all have been seen as commies and black listed, or, at least pink listed.

Times have changed.

These days, everyone knows that you don't have to do anything radical to be watch-worthy. In fact, somehow, over the past 30 or 40 years, we have, depending on your point of view, either become oblivious to the amount of data that bit by bit is collected about us, or complicit in the whole thing.

Unless we are willing to cross over to the Luddite camp, some of this seems unavoidable. If we use cell phones, banks, charge accounts, shopping discount cards, the Internet, or pay our taxes, we are creating data. There are a few people who successfully live off the grid, but somehow, living in a cabin somewhere in the wilds of Alberta (or Montana) doesn't hold much appeal. 

That being said, things are beginning to feel spooky.

And the truly spooky part is not that our everyday life generates so much collectible data, but that a sizable percentage of people, especially younger people, don't seem to think that there really is anything that should remain private. I'm not talking about those idiots who put pictures of their skinny butts on MySpace, oblivious to the fact that a potential employer might not find it amusing.

Wait, a minute, I am talking about them.

There's got to be some middle ground, something between living in a cabin in the woods and being buck-nekkid (in a virtual way). I'm pretty sure that the fellow who worries about cameras in Britain yelling "UNMUTUAL, UNMUTUAL" at us is as big a nutjob as the MySpace member who feels compelled to tell us exactly what illegal substance he is ingesting, or thinking about ingesting. Finding that middle ground, though, seems pretty daunting.

I guess I'll just do what I have been doing all along. I'll call the town I live in Tamingville in my weblog and use someone else's phone number when I buy granola at the grocery store. I won't live off the grid, but I won't confuse my public life with my private life either.

Mebbe I'll even change my last name to Smith.

 

posted by taming at 22:54 | link | comments (1)|
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The Real Me

I am a mean and selfish human being. No, no, no—do not leap to my defense quite yet. Do not blame it on my cold/strep infection. I really am like this all the time; it's just that with all the feeling yucky stuff going on, I don't have the energy to hide it right now.

I woke up late this morning, after having been up snorfling, coughing, and sneezing several times. I could hear RT downstairs in the shower, and rather than feeling bad because we had missed our usual early morning time together, all I could think was that it meant that I would have the coffee all to myself. I wouldn't have to share this mighty fine coffee with someone who, wonderful as he is, really isn't coffee worthy, at least not when we are talking about drinking the very last of my Carmen Estate 1800 beans.

So now, 45 minutes later, he's gone off to work, where he will drink some gawd awful pod stuff, whilst I am here with the good brew, waiting for it to transform me into someone nice enough to actually be married to this fine man.

I'm three cups into the pot, and I have already gotten nice enough to be willing to drive him to the office party I can't attend tonight, so that he can have a good time, and take a company provided taxi home, without leaving his car at the hotel overnight. Heck, I've gotten nice enough to realize that I don't want to go to the party and possibly infect 150 people with strep.

I'm drinking this coffee from a lovely bone china cup given to me (as part of a set of four) by my friend Louise when I was staying at her apartment in downtown Toronto. She gave me lovely cups, and I left her with a bad cold. I do let RT have his coffee in one of these, but, even after I recover from this episode of the glotch, he will drink his coffee from a Disney mug if he ever breaks one of these cups.

See, I told you I am mean and selfish.

 

posted by taming at 07:42 | link | comments (2)|
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