Archive for July, 2001

Posted on July 19, 2001 - by deCadmus

Coffee Crack

Barry Jarrett’s Espresso Taliaferro is the coffee equivalent of crack. There. I said it. I’ve come clean. Now how do I treat this addiction, save for pulling another shot?

I don’t know what he puts in this blend–I’m only just beginning to get a handle on roasting for brewed coffee, much less espresso. It’s a truly rich flavor–full-bodied and complex with a zippy finish that cuts though the milk in a cappuccino, while more than rounded enough for a straight shot [make mine a double, please.] Its aromatics bloom on your tongue and zoom around in your head and… wow. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to pull one more.

Just one. Really.

Posted on July 17, 2001 - by deCadmus

Roasting Update

Been consumed with other projects, so I’ve let a day or two go by without roasting new things. That’s something that the Hearthware roaster allows more than the Freshroast… its half-cup-of-green capacity makes for a surprisingly large difference in roasted beans after a few batches.

I received my first batch of beans from Riley’s Coffee–both green and roasted. Barry Jarrett’s roasted coffee comes highly recommended, so I’ve glommed on to a couple of his espresso blends to see if I can roast something that in any way resembles his own finished product. It’s worth noting, too, that Barry carries the excellent PNG Mile High, and at better prices than I’ve found elsewhere.

Posted on July 17, 2001 - by deCadmus

Converting

Meta.
I’m converting Bloggle from SSI to PHP, with an eye toward a far more interactive experience. While I’ll make every effort to keep the build process behind the scenes, some bits might break. [There's always something, isn't there?] Hopefully any such incident will be brief, if it occurs at all. Should you find something broken, however, feel free to let me know.

Posted on July 17, 2001 - by deCadmus

Cave News

Having recently delved into the mythos and methods of mediums [and toyed with the ambitions and abilities of Thug, our archetypical cave artist], I’ve immensely enjoyed the recent discovery of what appear to be the world’s oldest cave engravings.

So what inspired Thug? What burned in his heart 30 thousand years ago? Mythic animals, women and erotic imagery. Thirty millennia later, little has changed.

Posted on July 16, 2001 - by deCadmus

Buring the Midnite Coffee Oils

I should maybe add a bit of advice… progressive roasting on the dark side of the curve isn’t something you want to do late at night whilst other family members are nestled all snug in their beds. Tripping the smoke alarm in the middle of the night is bad form. Or so I’ve been told.

Posted on July 16, 2001 - by deCadmus

The Hearthware Gourmet

I’ve spent quite a lot of time this weekend roasting with my new Hearthware Gourmet roaster. I’ve spent at least some of that time making coffee that I’m willing to drink–but much of what I roasted was completely awful.

I can’t blame the Hearthware. It’s a very capable roaster… far more so, I think, than the Freshroast that I’ve been using for six months. Just the same, it roasts differently–beans are much darker at a given roast with the Hearthware, and the roast smell is different. These two characteristics together have been more than enough to trip me up.

Finally, I got smart. I pulled out a bag of my most inexpensive beans and did a fairly thorough progressive roast–starting at what appeared to be a reasonable medium roast, and then varying the roast duration by 30 seconds either side of that point. Finally! Something drinkable! In fact, a couple of very tasty roasts–and both of them far darker than what I’m used to with the Freshroast.

My testing and tasting are far from done, but now I have a reasonable baseline. And I’m back to keeping a roast log… I’ll write up the details on that bit of handy record keeping a little later.

Posted on July 16, 2001 - by deCadmus

Context Switching

Somewhere in Dante’s Hell there must be a room, a pit–perhaps even an entire level–for those who commit the atrocity of abusive context switching. [A term I've appropriated from the programmers' lexicon.] You’re probably far more familiar with its use–and its abuse–than you realize. Consider:

I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls and they say, “Because it’s such a beautiful animal…”
There you go.
Well, I think my mother’s attractive, but I have photographs of her.

Ellen DeGeneres is particularly adept at using context switching in her stand-up comedy. It’s a jarring moment when we find that we’ve been led down the garden path to… well, something we didn’t expect. When it’s a stand-up act, we laugh. In film, we’re surprised. But when a context switch occurs in our everyday lives, we are momentarily confused–we stumble–and then we react, often at a visceral level.

Watch the face of any grade-schooler as the teacher announces a pop-quiz. First the stumble–a distinctive, blank deer-in-headlights gaze–and then,”But that’s not fair!” Of course it’s not fair. It wasn’t expected. It’s uncomfortable. And even as grown-ups we still don’t adjust well.

Acts as simple as placing a phone call can bring about a brush with context switching… when the phone is answered not by the person we intended to speak with, but instead by a machine. We stumble–momentarily at a loss for words–and then we react, and mentally kick ourselves for leaving awful, disjointed messages. Is it any wonder voice-mail was resisted so well, and for so long?

And then there’s the web. The web applications we use every day are riddled with context switches that are both unwelcome, and unwarranted. Inconsistent navigation, ill-conceived categories, irrelevant search results, increasingly intrusive ads–each degrades the meaning of the web experience by clouding its context. And just when users need context most–when we require assurances of trust and privacy–we’re sent off to shopping cart systems that live on other servers with different URLs and a completely different look and feel. And we stumble–we click away, and abandon our virtual shopping cart for a real one.

Establishing context is important. Maintaining context is critical.

Posted on July 12, 2001 - by deCadmus

Uganda Bugisu A, Mbale, 2001 Crop

• Rating: Rating:

If Kenya is the elder statesman of East African coffees, Uganda is the uncle that nobody talks about. You know the guy… he got in some trouble a few years back, he’s got a history of hanging around with the wrong crowd… and if he ever got around to really coming clean, nobody’d be likely to believe it.

While Uganda rubs shoulders with big brother Kenya–in fact, it shares Mount Elgon, the origin of Bugisu–the coffee of Uganda shares little else with its neighbor. Produced mostly by small crop family farms, this coffee has flavors and dimensions that are uniquely its own. (more…)

Posted on July 12, 2001 - by deCadmus

WaSP

I’ve found it difficult to line up behind the Web Standards Project [WaSP]. Not because I don’t support the call to standards, but because one of the legs the group stands on includes pressuring users to upgrade to standards-compliant browsers. I think that’s a tactic that only alienates one’s audience, and demonstrates a real misunderstanding of the users’ lot in this game.

On the other hand, I’m very encouraged by WaSP’s latest tactic: pressuring the publishers of site development tools to create products that write standards-compliant code. Speaking for WaSP, Tom Negrino [an occasional author] says: “None of the big tools–Dreamweaver, GoLive, FrontPage–none of them currently writes standards-compliant code.”

Good on you, WaSP.

Posted on July 9, 2001 - by deCadmus

Not Found

The discussion on MetaFilter about the end of Assembler raises some very interesting points on the transient nature of the web, and the role of the publisher/artist/designer/author. At the same time it rings the alarm bells. Some very good people–folks who’ve done much to both define and stretch the boundaries of this fledgling medium–are packing up their toys and taking their talents offline.

The web has always been an impermanent place. The stuff at the other end of the link can be fleeting: moved [300, 301], not found [404], gone [410]. It’s part of the design. Whether that’s a good thing… time will tell.