r e . a l i t y
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I did it!
Aug 16th
Yep… I actually did it.
I ended up going with the Andreja Premium espresso machine with a La Cimbali grinder.
This stuff sure didn’t look as big in the showroom as it does in the kitchen, but the shots are incredible!
I definitely see direct plumbing this in sooner rather than later!
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Making the leap into Coffee Nirvana
Aug 14th
I’ve been contemplating this for some time now, and I think that I’m getting close.
Besides getting a high quality grinder for my coffee setup, I think that I’m going to add an espresso machine as well. Trying to decide on a machine is a difficult choice given the number of machines out there, particularly when many share a lot of the same components.
The machine I get will be a pro-sumer, or semi-commercial one. I’ve been looking online at a few different ones:
Isomac Tea II
Livia 90
Quickmill Alexia
Quickmill Andreja Premium
The grinders that I’m considering are:
La Cimbali Jr.
Mazzer Mini
Macap M4 Stepless
I’m able to get everything locally – which I think is a big plus – I’m not a fan of import duties or brokerage fees. Got stung once with brokerage fees for an ebay purchase, and never again.
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What a show!
Jun 25th
Last night a friend and I went to see Roger Waters – The Dark Side of the Moon Live… and it was probably the best concert that I’ve ever seen, and the sound quality was the best I’ve heard in Rexall Place.
The show began with “In the Flesh”, which immediately had the crowd on their feet. I was blown away a couple songs later, when he performed “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” – I think that it sounded better than the original recording from “A Saucerful of Secrets” (released almost 40 years ago!). The performance included some stills from the Arnold Layne video.
I was under the impression that the first half of the show would be mostly Rogers solo works… but I was pleasantly surprised. It was fantastic hearing these classic tunes – I hadn’t seen Roger Waters perform since I had last seen him playing with Pink Floyd during the Animals tour. And when he played Sheep last night, I was floored – shivers ran up and down my spine….
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the coffee fix
May 7th
This past weekend I went and restocked my coffee bean supply – making my regular trip out to St. City Coffee Roasters. A pound of Ugandan – which has been my favorite these past few months, and also a pound of Ethiopian – a newer roast that they’ve been carrying – which is becoming a favorite as well.
On the way out there, I made a stop at MEC on 124 St., and picked up a couple other coffee accessories. A stainless steel mug/french press, and a compact hand grinder. The mug is fantastic – besides holding more coffee than my previous mug, this one has a very smooth action french press lid (as well as a regular drink lid). The french press lid also has a drink spout, but the nice touch is the addition of a fine stainless steel screen – so no more chewy coffee!
The grinder is about 5-6″ in diameter, and about 2.5″ high. The handle flips around so the whole thing is very compact – excellent for camping! I gave it a test grind – and the quality of grind is pretty decent. Tested the grinder and the press on the weekend, and for the $40 or so dollars I spent on the two, I am very pleased.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Handy commands
Dec 2nd
Had to identify certain files in a site consisting of 12,000+ pages. The files I was looking for were ones that did not have a Dreamweaver template applied to them. grep and gawk to the rescue…
First I did a grep, going recursively through the site, using the -c option. This counts the number of occurrances of the expression you’re looking for. It then appends :# to the end of the filename containing the match. The results I saved into a file.
grep -cr "searchstring" . > path/to/outputfile.txt
Since I was after files that did NOT have the search string, I used this:
grep -cr "searchstring" . | grep :0 > path/to/outputfile.txt
I then used gawk against the results file, to produce a new file, containing all filenames that had no matches of the grep.
gawk "/:0/ {print}" resultsfile.txt > newfile.txt
The results in newfile contained paths to binary files such as images, as well as the various other files that Dreamweaver creates when using Design notes or Check In/Check Out. To remove these, I ran gawk again:
gawk "!/images|.JPG|.mno|_notes|.LCK|.css|.xml/ {print} newfile.txt > newfile.txt
If I was more proficient with regular expressions, I might have been able to deal with that a little better. Doing the initial grep against only asp, htm, html files, to find the occurrences of InstanceBegin. Perhaps a visitor to this site that comes across this post might have a more efficient routine. I did try using xargs, but I kept getting errors.
Did all this at the office with UnxUtils (and the UnxUpdates applied) on a Windows 2000 workstation. At home, I use Cygwin (base installation) on XP Pro x64
Popularity: 1% [?]
