I really can’t say it any better than this right now. I seldom agree with Newt Gingrich. He’s a sloppy academic, a disgusting, reprehensible human being, and it’s stunning that he is not incarcerated. But he’s right on the money today.
My “desktop” machine has been a problem of late. I do most of my home computing on a Mac laptop and like it a great deal. My desktop machine is a tougher call, though. I like the Mac OS well enough to use it there, too, but Apple doesn’t sell the desktop I want. They offer either the all-in-one iMac, the underpowered mini, or the insane Mac Pro workstation. I want a machine in between the iMac and the Pro. Its purpose is to run server applications that I want to use on my LAN (along with serving as a development sandbox for my own stuff) and to be a virtual machine host so that I have a beefy and convenient place to try out new software that I don’t trust yet.
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This is available locally from Murky Coffee. Besides being relatively easy to work with, it’s what they use in house. This gives me a decent way to benchmark my equipment and technique against the best I can find around here. The batch I got was roasted 9/2. The first shot of the morning was one for the sink, but the second was really, really sweet.
What’s a little mystifying to me is that I liked my shot slightly better than the same shot at Murky yesterday. I have no explanation for this. It’s the same coffee. Their machine is much better. Their grinder is better. Anyone in that shop has much more trained, more consistent technique than I do. But somehow this morning’s shot was more to my taste than yesterday’s. Go figure. (To be clear, just in case this turns up in search results or something… theirs was excellent. Mine today just suited my palate a bit better and I’m not sure why.)
I really, really wanted to like this one. I picked it up at Rappahannock coffee on Columbia Pike. They roast in house, and it was very fresh. It was also way over-roasted for my taste. Near the end of the bag, I learned that dialing down the temperature on the machine might help salvage it, but I didn’t have enough left at that point to really experiment. I did not manage to get anything that didn’t taste burnt. Furthermore, it was so oily that it was hard to work with in the grinder.
I will probably go back to Rappahannock, but not on the strength of this batch. It would be very nice to find a good locally roasted espresso blend.
Just opened a bag that was roasted about two weeks ago. (That makes it exactly the same age as the peaberry I just finished.) This is a slightly lighter roast. It required me to go two clicks finer on the grinder to hit the sweet spot. It’s really flowery and maybe just a little acidic for my taste, at least as a shot. I’m reserving judgement on this one for now, but really enjoying it in an americano.
Just before I reached the end of my bag, I started getting consistently good shots from this one. This was more a matter of learning curve than anything related to the beans. Compared to the CC toscano blend everyone serves, this one is a bit more woody and ever so slightly more bitter. I definitely like it enough that I’ll include it on my next Boca order.
I’m probably going to be throwing espresso notes online here, since it seems as good a place as any to keep track of them. For the benefit of the innocents who might stumble across insane espresso posts and wonder, here’s the story of how the setup came about along with notes about the equipment.
So I finally snapped. I’ve been considering improving my coffee making setup approximately since we got the house. About a month ago, our coffee maker suddenly stopped making the water hot enough to brew a decent pot. I had always planned that the next coffee machine I got was going to be a good one, but hadn’t done my research to determine that. So I bought a press pot from target to keep me caffeinated and got to researching.
[via Seth Godin]
So I’ve been playing with Symfony a bit lately, and it’s growing on me. I think I understand most of the “magic,” and am now looking to convince myself that it’s actually safe.
Since the different notes I found through google all have undesirable side effects (IMO), here’s how I did it. My goal was to minimize lasting impact on my system (i.e. I’d like to delete /Applications/MAMP and have everything back to normal, more or less) and minimal deviation from the standard MAMP install.
These notes were taken while setting up symfony 1.0 on MAMP 1.7.
