David Gessel
Rental Hummer H3
Odd vehicle awaited me at Hertz when I got in: H3. It isn’t that big, drives like a normal SUV. The faux-armor windows are a bit odd from the inside and it has, therefore, less visibility than a normal SUV, but otherwise seems like any suburban 4WD luxury minivan-ish truck conversion. Maybe there are some challenging roads around Guelph…
New coffee machine at BOS RCC does not suck
The new espresso machine at the Boston Red Carpet Club does not actually suck. It wouldn’t win any contests against a decent cafe, but it is as good as the starbucks with the espresso automats that seem to have taken over the airports.
Google Sync For Mobile Works, “Sync” Fails
I used to be very happy with Google Sync. It worked great and got my outlook calendar to my google calendar reliably and easily. And with google’s gears-based offline calendar, my calendar life seemed complete.
Until… it just didn’t sync. Not at all. I was always disappointed it would only sync to my default calendar, but not syncing at all, well that just sucks.
So I tried Sync for my blackberry. It worked perfectly (so far) and lets me choose which calendar to send my data to, which is perfect for keeping work and personal calendars separate and allows me do bidirectional sync without populating my work calendar with embarrassing personal events.
The only problem is that I tried to sync my contacts from Google Contacts. That was bad, mmmkay, because Google contacts SAID it would parse VCAL files, so I exported a vcal directory from Mulberry mail (and you know Cyrus got the format perfect to the letter) and google read every VCAL field as an entry, so I had 1200 people named BEGIN: VCAL, and 1200 people named END… etc.
Now Google, in their unfathomable wisdom, only lets you delete 500 entries at a time. Which means individually ticking the entries one at a time until there are less than 500 identical entries (like BEGIN: VCAL) which can then be bulk deleted. That was not happening. I tried, thus, to sync 8,000 plus entries to my blackberry and that did not work… that’s why there is the “fail” notice.
But somebody pointed out that you can switch to the “Older Version” and from that you can delete more than 500 entries a time and this bug was fixed in the newer version to prevent such deletions. From the older version you can search and delete larger groups (at least 1324 at a time).
You may need to log out of google and log back in to propagate the deletions to the New Version.
Coffee Science Update
Magnetically stirred coffee seems to be a success, but still tuning the parameters. I have a surplus temperature control module connected to a thermocouple probe to monitor the temperature.
My first attempt was confounded by not programming the controller to read a K-type thermocouple, it came set for a J-type and so the water never got over 88C even boiling… which it did for a while and that’s not good. Not good at all.
Today I let the water temp get up to 80C and the coffee was very good, smooth and not bitter at all. Perhaps a bit too smooth, a bit like the cold-brew taste but warm and much faster thanks to the stirring action. I will try 90C tomorrow and if success continues, modify the hotplate to add a direct thermal element bypass to the outside so the temp controller can control the heater directly (now I just watch and turn off the heater at the target temp.)
The theory is that by continuously stirring the coffee, a lot of flavor is extracted without relying on heat, and that the stirring also ensures uniform heating through the entire volume and thus the temperature can be set fairly precisely (to about a degree C, +/- 1 degree or so) to optimize differential extraction of the organics in the grounds.
Aggro Spider
Lers ros thai
Excellent, open until 2:00am
Magnetically Stirred Coffee
Tastes like science! Mmmmm. Good science! Next, instrument with a temp controller to monitor and shut off automatically.
Science Fair Time Again
Isabella likes colors. And fire. So she wanted to make colored fire. We tried a lot of different techniques, some we found on the interwebs and some we made up to make colored flames from various chemicals we got from United Nuclear.
We tried my childhood Bunsen burner with straight ethanol which didn’t work out so well. Contaminating the wick with chemicals was effective, but not in distinguishing between sample chemicals.
Abetone Ski Resort
Abetone is literally within sight of our apartment in Tuscany. While it is not more than 15km away as the crow flies, it is a 52km drive that takes a bit more than an hour because it goes through a lot of small towns and up into the mountains (much longer in inclement weather).
We did not try the Mutlipass (a la 5th element) but we did ski all the trails lifts in Val de Luce, which is a US equivalent resort with condos and rental shops and big parking lots and easy lift access about 10km and 20 min further away from us than the first lift that access the greater Abetone ski area.
It is about half the size in terms of lifts and capacity of Megeve, and not nearly as extensively developed. Where Megeve has lots of gondola and acceleration lifts, Abetone is dominated by treadmill acceleration lifts. It is gorgeous, wide-open terrain.
We visited after a long season of heavy snows, but late enough that warm days had made a hard cover and thus skiing on piste was barely distinguishable from off-piste, in fact the piste had more scraped powder.
But the open, forgiving terrain invites exploration and there certainly is plenty of it. While we only spent a half day there (vs. three days in Megeve) we found our own favorite geography and never had to share it with anyone else. The user small compared to Megeve, and infitesimal compared to US resorts: we never had to wait in a lift line and once we cleared the debark we were free of any other skiers even when the schools were operating.
I’m not sure I’d make Abetone an international destination, but as a convenient, local resort, it is far superior to Tahoe on anything but the best days, and only an hour away. If I was in Borgo A.M., I’d make the trip after every fresh snowfall.
