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The greatest things in the world are pleasant thoughts; and the great art of life is to have as many of them as possible.

- Michel de Motaigne

my personality, like frank's black, is my gift, and my curse.

i am not satisfied with "it basically works" or "good enough". i crave perfection. it is why i enjoy video games like "demons souls", and my all-time favorite, "planescape: torment". both games are the D&D video game equivalent of "groundhog day": you die, and die, and die again until you get things just perfect, then you win.

knowing about my quest for perfection, I gave away Silvia, my espresso machine, a while ago. silvia offered endless opportunity for the quest to perfection. i could play with her all day long and occasionally get the perfect cup of coffee -- the legendary God Shot. but as my hobbies multiplied, i found that i didn't want to spend all day chasing a shot. i wanted to have the shot and get on with things. that just wasn't happening with silvia, and also, espresso makes an unbelievable mess in the kitchen.

but i missed having espresso. so i decided that in 2012 i'd get a new machine. i did my research last year: what was the state of the art? it turned out, to my surprise, that the most excellent machine for me was the same machine I was lusting after in 2006 and 2007: the Quick Mill Andreja Premium. In 2011 my espresso knowledge was woefully out of date, but I did a smart thing: I remembered that I knew everything there was to know back in 2007, and if Andreja was my choice then, and there wasn't anything new on the market, then Andreja was the machine for me. So I ordered it. It arrived yesterday.

I went out and bought some beans at my local coffee shop, because I was woefully underprepared -- I did not have fresh espresso beans ready. That turned out to be a good thing: I wasted a half pound of commercial beans getting my grinder "dialed in" -- that is, adjusted so that it produced the proper size coffee grounds for my purposes. And then, just when I got the grind to the point where Andreja produced the proper 2oz shot in about 25 seconds, I tasted the coffee.

Man, did it suck. Bleh!

Fortunately, last night, I roasted a half pound of Sweet Maria's Moka Kadir blend, to about a Full City+, a little light for espresso, maybe. Certainly, way too fresh for espresso. Coffee, after roasting, gives off CO2 for a couple of days. If you put really fresh coffee into an espresso machine, it tends to gush out uncontrollably as the gas release is accelerated by the brew process. But I was desperate for a decent shot out of my shiney new toy. So I went for it.

The first two shots choked the poor dear. I had ground the beans too fine, and no water was able to get through. Still, Andreja handled it like a champ, and didn't complain. I apologized and adjusted my grind. This was the sort of thing I hated about espresso: always adjusting, never tasting.

Then I pulled the third shot. Third time's the charm. Holy cow.

I did almost everything wrong that third time: my grind was still too fine, my tamp wasn't level (I have a single spout portafilter handle, and the spout is off-center, making it very difficult to get a level tamp. fortunately, my new tamp stand will be here soon :D), likely the machine wasn't at the optimal temperature.

None of that mattered. Good beans + reasonable approximation of good technique + Andreja = awesome shot. Perhaps not a God Shot, but so close to a Silvia god shot, with so many screwups, that my mind was blown. I'm still shocked at how great that shot was, with so many errors on my part.

I think I'm on to something here. I wanted effortlessness, and I've got it. It still makes an unbelievable mess (in the very literal sense of the word, unbelievable) and exposes all sorts of problems in my kitchen layout and lighting. But with very little effort, my coffee knowledge is rewarded with amazing espresso, and not endless tweaking frustration (this is, of course, making the big assumption that my next shot will be as good as the one I'm blabbing about now!)

For your viewing pleasure, meet Andreja:

andreja and her support crew have taken over part of the kitchen. hops hasn't complained yet, and once she starts steaming milk, and eventually, i bet, making americanos, she'll be happy for the coffee bar.

i wanted shiney. andreja is shiney. good thing i had a shirt on when i took this picture

andreja is ridiculously large. i thought silvia was large, andreja is way bigger. forget about under-cabinet. t-mobile G2 for scale.

but i'm lucky i decided to go into computers. really, in this world, by which i mean the upper-middle-class world of modern western countries, if you don't have computer skills, you're at the mercy of those who do.

for example, i wanted to create a slideshow of photos from my trip. i could use iphoto to do that, or iphoto could "export" it to iweb, or i could have dealt with flickr or picasa or whatever. but none of them did exactly what i wanted. so i used iphoto and two simple regular expressions in textmate, and voilà, i have exactly what i was looking for.

for me, it was a simple matter. but for someone who didn't know regular expressions, it's an entirely intractable problem and they must settle for whatever their Product Of Choice has spoonfed them.

these facts are why I am upset about the direction that Apple is leading the industry. the ipadification of computing removes my ability to do what I want, even though I find that as an old geezer I really don't want to do lots of spare-time programming. but when I want to do it, dammit i want to do it. and i couldn't have done this on an ipad.

it isn't, really, we're a culture that just can't let go of crappy music. but i'll pretend it's over.

as much as i love being in the caribbean, it's nice to have a day where i don't have to cover myself in a layer of aloe, then sunscreen, then mosquito repellant, then later, more sunscreen, and more mosquito repellent.

i really don't know how people live there without going broke from buying all that stuff.

as long as one doesn't take it too far. my next drink is dedicated to christopher hitchens.

i am happy for the hard work of labor unions worldwide that gave me the five day work week. thank god it's the weekend.

i'm pretty happy i live in an area where gun violence (whether it's person-on-person or involving police) is rare.

thank the FSM for hipster food. no, really. since monday, i've eaten:

every day breakfast: home roasted coffee (i was a home roaster before it was mainstream)

M lunch: artisan smoked pulled pork sangwich at The Ravioli House in San Mateo

M dinner: pork buns from the artists formerly known as Chairman Bao, the food truck. i declared at the time and maintain that the large pork bun I had that night was the best food I've ever eaten.

T lunch: hipster belgian beer and hipster pastrami steak with fries at the Refuge in San Carlos. it is called The Refuge because it's a refuge on the peninsula for hipsters who are too hip to live in the city.

T dinner: hipster kathi roll indian food from curry up now, where the hipsters know my wife by name. then off to rock climb with hipsters.

W lunch: hipster artisan pizza followed by hipster cannoli.

W dinner will break the trend.

thank the FSM for hipsters or i'd be forced to eat el torito for lunch and mcDonalds for dinner, every day.

i am thankful for good coffee, and i frankly don't care if this is a duplicate. this has been (and will continue to be) a month of hotel coffee, so when i get the chance to have a cup of home roasted blueberry creamy i-don't-even-remember-the-origin-because-i-roasted-it-before-i-left, well, it's a little overwhelming.

excuse me while i kiss the sky!