Caffeine overdose

This blog will be laid to rest. My new blog can be found at wstryder.org. For now this blog will be left to rust at this url, but perhaps the content will later be moved over to wstryder.org, perhaps not. Let’s see what happens.

From Dexter season 2 episode 7:

Angel: “Kill one man you’re a murderer. Kill thousands a conqueror. Kill them all and you’re a god”

Dexter: “To tell you the truth I don’t know what my alter ego had in mind when he wrote that crap, I just pulled it from various blogs on the Internet”

What, Dexter don’t listen to Megadeth?!?

(What do you mean that’s not from Dave Mustaine? Jean who?)

I’ve got two loadsa tickets to Iron Maiden baby
Come with me Friday 18th July 2008, don’t say maybe!

In case you don’t already know, I love coffee! Finns drink the most coffee in the world, 4 to 5 cups per day on average, or 11.2kg per person a year - and it’s no wonder - because the best coffee in the world is made in Finland, at Robert Paulig’s. OK, I’m maybe a little biased, because I’ve just been bribed with a bag full of Paulig’s stuff:

In any case, I was really happy to win a one evening coffee course at Robert Paulig’s Coffee Institute in Helsinki. The course was simply awesome - great tips for brewing coffee, a lot of free coffee, different coffee varieties, really good time, some more coffee, a little bit of espresso, a few cappuccinos, some Irish coffee, Frezza Mocha, French coffee, hotshots, and oh - just when you thought they’d run out of coffee - a few more cups of the world’s most addictive beverage! If you ever get a chance to participate, I highly recommend this course. First part of the course - which coffee goes with which pastry:

Guatemala, Ethiopia, Kenya, Colombia - all really good, but you need to watch out what kind of pastry you serve with each. They recommend you should always serve darker roast with spicier foods, for example cheese cake with French roast, and mild roast with mildly flavored foods. Sounds pretty logical, doesn’t it? If you serve a very strong roast with subtly flavored cake, you will not taste any of the finer aromas of the cake, and on the other hand, mildly roasted coffee will not taste much like coffee when served with very spicy foods.

Now on to the main thing: How to brew great coffee. 10 easy steps should do it:

1. Buy a real coffeemaker. The water needs to heat to 92-96°C. A cheap machine will not heat the water enough and will result in a disappointment. A Moccamaster should do (no, they didn’t bribe me, honest!).
2. Clean your coffeemaker daily. Wash the coffee pot, funnel and other necessary parts of the machine with sodium bicarbonate (cooking soda), use a solution of 3 table spoons per 1 liter of water in order to wash off any coffee grease accumulated in the coffeemaker.
3. Store the coffee grounds in your fridge, always seal the package properly and never pour the grounds to another container - oxygen is the coffee bean’s worst enemy!
4. Use clean, fresh water. Move to Finland if the water in your area sucks.
5. Always use the right size filter, never buy cheap filters.
6. Don’t pour water in to the coffeemaker with your coffee pot, otherwise coffee grease will start to collect inside the coffeemaker, resulting in a rancid taste at worst.
7. When pouring grounds in to the filter, even the grounds gently - but don’t shake the filter to do so. If you do, fine coffee dust will fill the pores of the filter resulting in an uneven brew.
8. Use 7g of grounds per 1.25dl of fresh water.
9. When ready, stir the coffee gently with a spoon, otherwise the strongest coffee will be left at the bottom.
10. The coffee will stay good for max half an hour. Enjoy!

All work no blog makes Late a dull boy

All work no blog makes Late a…. rich boy I guess.

Been playing with my N95 lately. Why do people always compare the N95 and the iPhone? They are two totally different devices - one of them is a useless toy and the other one is what computers have become - a superb PDA, phone, camera and GPS in one shell. Revolutionary touchscreen interface? Nice, but I find real features much more useful. With the N95 I can geotag my pictures automagically and send them to flickr instantly. How cool is that?

So far I haven’t had much time to experiment with third party apps, apart from twibble, which makes twittering kind of faster and allows you to geotag tweets automagically. ShoZu does the same thing for images. For screenshots, Antony Pranata’s screenshot seems to do it’s job. GoogleMaps and Gmail are simply a must.

The only thing that sucks about the N95 is the battery - with GPS and 3G it’ll run out in couple of hours But that’s still better than no 3G and no GPS.

Blogging is hard. Anyway, Sini - I hope you’re happy now

I always thought 3D graphics was difficult. Well now I know it is. Following this excellent tutorial I was able to create this:

Only took me like five hours, but at least now I sort of know how Blender works.

[huge image]

“What are you staring at?!?”

56th Valokuvatorstai photo challenge, “Uni”, which can either mean sleep or dream. Half ostrich, half Bambi, she came to me in a dream. Yes, the picture is photoshopped (gimpped, to be more precise).

Uni - tällainen unikuva syntyi tänä aamuna.

Nice hint from Pinseri (Fin), you can now embed Google’s “My maps” in your blog, or where ever. Here’s a map of Tallinn’s Old Town with the most famous tourist attractions listed. <borat voice>Google is nice, I like.</borat voice>

View Larger Map

Yeah, that’s me. Pretty accurate picture actually. Simpsons avatar

[1200px] - [3008px]

55th Valokuvatorstai photo challenge, “Kas kummaa”, probably best translated as “WTF?”. I took this pic at Korkeasaari Zoo in Helsinki. This creature is an axolotl, a neotenic mole salamander, arguably the weirdest creature on our planet. Looks like an alien from outer space, a monster from a bad science fiction novel. Perhaps this is an unfinished prototype or a cruel joke from God? A genetic experiment gone horribly wrong? Creepy.

Aksolotlihan se siinä. Kas kummaa kerrakseen!