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Coffee Grinder: Fail

Published October 15, 2008

Toilet paper (for my nose) and coffee (for my soul) on a desk at work.

Almost every morning before work I grind some coffee then prepare it in an AeroPress. Not this morning. Today when I went to press START or GRIND or whatever the button is labeled nothing happened. Because it appears to be somewhat microprocessor controlled I don’t think the problem is mechanical, which means that hopefully I’ll be able to easily fix it.

Unfortunately, this was also half-way through a study I was doing on exactly how many cups of coffee I can get out of two pounds of coffee, how many grinds it takes, how many filters are used, etc. Although maybe this will just prompt me to restart and this time take into account amount of electricity consumed, cost of the grinder, etc. I’m wanting to know just how much money I’m saving (or perhaps not) and how much less waste I’m generating by making coffee at home every day, using what I perceive to be an easy process.

Since I uploaded a few more photos today to my moblog, I’ll point them all out:

· This praying mantis was found next to a gas pump. It was alive, but its abdomen was full of ants which were eating it.
· My coworker Brian gave me some Airborne to try and help make me feel better. It doesn’t taste horrible.
· Some of the urinals at work have these new scented mats in them. The result is that hot urine makes a very strong fragrence waft up while going. It’s unplesant.
· One of my coworkers gave me this cupcake. It’s very, very good.

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Not Comfort Food

Published October 14, 2008

Falafel, hummus, and garlic from Lebanese Grill in Shelby Township, MI.

I really like Lebanese food and when I couldn’t decide what to have for dinner (I didn’t want leftovers again) I decided to go get some falafel, hummus, and garlic. It tasted really good, but it just didn’t hit the spot while sick.

That said, Lebanese Grill between Costco and Hall Road in Shelby Township is pretty darn good. I’m glad to have that place close by, because it means that I can get good Lebanese food pretty much whenever I want it.

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Boxes Are Gone

Published October 14, 2008

Breaking down the large pile of cardboard boxes in the basement and carrying them upstairs has worn me out. It’s a good thing I didn’t give into temptation and go for a bike ride.

Now to find some dinner. Last night was some nice Thai curry, but as I also had that for lunch, three meals of it in a row is a bit off putting. Pizza is tempting, but unhealthy. Someone come make me soup? And bring a movie?

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Rear Hub Fixed

Published October 14, 2008

With a few minutes to spare I pulled apart the rear hub on my bike and put it back together. Why, you ask? Well, as I was checking things over before Massive Fallout I noticed a gentle rolling/rattling sound coming from the rear hub. This got me realizing that I must have knocked a bearing out of a race when reassembling the hub the last time, not noticed it, and had it rolling around inside the hub body.

Being a bearing shy isn’t a horrible thing, but I did want to get it sorted out as quickly as possible, especially as I’d put 100-200 miles on the bike since noticing the bearing. Having a full set of cone wrenches (three dual-sized ones, doing the 13mm-18mm range) and a bench vise makes this job trivial.

Also, my lower GI has now realized that the rest of me is sick and begun following suit. Fun.

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Autumn Storms

Published October 14, 2008

Being sick I decided it’d be best to stay home and work from here today. I normally don’t take time off work for being sick, but I’m feeling spinny, didn’t sleep well, and I’m having difficulties talking. Sitting at work today would just be awful, and I’d probably be making other people sick.

On the upside, I’m sitting here looking out the window as a gentle autumn storm is starting to roll through, removing leaves from trees. It won’t be very long until wanders in the woods are through tall, thick gray sticks over soft, decaying leaves. This will be nice.

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Sick!

Published October 13, 2008

Yep, I’m sick… What I thought was just some irritated tonsils yesterday has shown itself to be a full-blown cold. Sinuses are filling, throat hurts, and I feel spinny and spacy and drunk. Fun, eh?

I hope I’m better by Wednesday, as that’s Danielle’s birthday and we’re supposed to go to a French cheese event at Zingerman’s Deli.

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Coupons.com Sucks

Published October 12, 2008

Coupons.com requires you to install some special software for diabetic coupon printing, and it specifically does not work in VMs.

My grandma needed some coupons printed which are related to an arthritis drug called Zostrix (note the rel="nofollow") but was having some problems doing so. My mom also had such problems, so I decided to give it a go using my shiny new printer.

It turns out that the coupons for this drug are printed via Coupons.com, but when I went to use their service I was informed that it didn’t support my browser (FF3 on a Mac). Switching over to a VM running IE7 under XP I found that the site requires one to install some sort of silly coupon printing software in order to do the printing. Since I was using a VM I took a snapshot then attempted to install the software, at which point I received the above error.

The damned software refuses to install in a VM.

At this point I’m just not going to print the coupons… I don’t want to cruft up my normal or work machines (the only interactive non-VMs I have) with such crap, so there’s not much more I can do. Digging around a bit more on it, I found this writeup called A Closer Look at Coupons.com which details quite a number of questionable things done by this software.

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2008 Massive Fallout: Success

Published October 12, 2008

Jeff, Rob, and I (Steve) after finishing up our ride in Massive Fallout 2008.

Yesterday I rode in the 2008 Massive Fallout, a very large group mountain bike ride which routes through four of the best mountain bike trails in the area. I did three of the parks: Stony Creek, Bald Mountain, and Addison Oaks, riding along for most of the route with three other guys, Jeff, Rob, and Jeremy.

Per my bike’s computer I rode just over 46 miles. While I’ve ridden a longer distance in one go before, this was a much more difficult ride because of all the single track, amazingly fun climbs, etc. Here is the original map of the available routes [PDF] and here is marked-up map showing the approximate route we rode.

I only fell once, and that was during a fairly quick downhill part in Bald Mountain, where when going around a sandy curve at the bottom my front wheel started to slide out and I just went down. The only damage was a slightly scraped elbow, knee, and calf, and a slight sore thigh. Nothing bad at all. Today I’m just a bit worn out feeling still, but not sore. Still, I think I’ll wait a day or three before getting back out on the trails.

(Also: I keep thinking of getting a Surly Cross Check for riding non-mountain bike stuff. It’d be perfect for rides to Metro Beach, up the trails, stuff like that. I keep talking myself into and out of getting one, with the price of ~$1k being the biggest reason holding me back.)

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Paved Night Ride

Published October 9, 2008

Everyone who was on the ride around Mt. Clemens except for me. Left to right is Perry, John, Marty, Nick, and Mike.

Here, have a photo of everyone who went for a ride tonight from Mt. Clemens High School to Metro Beach and back, except for me. It’s not a very good photo. This one of Marty and Nick is better, despite the huge amount of noise from the high ISO.

After getting home from the ride I stuck the extra RAM in the printer and my Mac, and everything seems to be working great. The printer (Xerox Phaser 6130N) got a 1GB Crucial SO-DIMM (CT12864AC53E) to bring it to 1.1GB and the Mac Pro got 4GB of RAM bringing it to 7GB. I now can run multiple VMs with ease and deal with multiple large image files without a bunch of paging.

It’s been a good day and a good evening.

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