Gah, stupid fingers, that was supposed to be "preview". Anyway, I'm still a wine snob, meaning I think most wine is shite but I like wine that, well, I like. Follow my advice further up in this thread, my son, and you too shall be reborn as a coffee fanatic.
I'm so sorry for you. Gah, s'like the first time I tasted good wine. As a beer drinker, I thought wine was crap. Then I tasted decent wine and I realized what all the fuss is about. I'm still
Here's an idea, zippy: how's about you slow the fuck down and stop speeding? Yeah, I know, you're the most important person on the road and the rest of us should get the hell out of your way. The cops are just out to get you, it's not that you were doing 80 in a school zone.
Guess what? Speeding is a real crime. Speeders kill more people every year than serial killers do. I'm glad the cops are cracking down on your selfish, speeding ass.
You're everyone's problem. Every time you get behind the wheel of a car, you're unsafe.
What? No, I wasn't just cut off in traffic this morning by some dumb punk in a mustang, causing me to skid on the ice and spill my coffee, and even if I was, I certainly wouldn't be taking my frustration out on random slashdotters. This is a moral issue, yeah, that's it, a moral issue.
To some people, drinking Starbucks is like wearing off-the-shelf. Sure, it's nice for the common man, but what are we effete snobs to do? These are the same people that would wear trash bags with dolls' heads stapled to them if it was in fashion. I'm a coffee gourmand, I like lots and lots of coffee. I happen to like good coffee, and know the difference, but I'm also perfectly happy with a big strong cup of truck-stop special degreaser coffee. Just pack that sucker full of artificial flavor packets and sweetener of some sort and I'm good to go.
I absolutely agree. I lived in Hawaii for a while and drank Kona a fair amount. It's highly overrated, as is Jamaican Blue Maountain. My personal favorite is a nice Guatamalan. That's one you need to drink fresh to appreciate, the spicy notes are all lost after two days.
Starbucks does server their coffee too hot. You'd think they'd have learned from McDonalds' little incident...
Newer is better, although after three days you don't have to worry because it's gotten as bad as it's going to get for weeks. After three days, gourmet coffee will still taste good, but 90% of what differentiates, say, an east African coffee from a central American coffee is gone. That $30/pound Kona or Blue Mountain is now no different than a good $6/pound Columbian.
Some differences, notably body and acidity, will still be there, but the complex and subtle flavors have all evaporated.
A clinker is a lightweight, immature bean that tastes awful. Ever taste rancid, burnt, grassy, or hay-like flavors in coffee? If brewing isn't the problem, those flavors are most likely from clinkers.
That's probably more than you ever wanted to know about coffee. I only know all this because my college girlfriend worked at a REALLY snooty coffe roaster, Willoughby's in New Haven, CT. If you want to try some really good coffee, I think they do mail-order.
Well, the clinker issue is different from roast control. I know Starbucks is pretty good at maintaining a consistent roast, but finding clinkers is only something that can be done on a small scale by experienced individuals. The best farms do a good job of pre-sorting, and the best distributers do another round of sorting, but the best roasters do two more: one before roasting and one after. I'd be willing to bet that Starbucks does sort, but I'd also be willing to bet they only sort out twigs and pebbles before roasting. You can only sort clinkers when using the batch method, continuous methods such as all large scale commercial roasters use do not lend themselves to pawing through beans looking for off-colored ones. In fact, Cooks Illustrated did a coffee comparison, counting the number of clinkers per pound as well as testing to see if people could taste a difference. People can, and Starbucks coffee did not have the lowest ratio of clinkers of the coffee tested.
My advice, find a local coffee roaster that knows what they are doing (most don't). Ask what kind of roaster they use. (Dietrich is good) Ask how they store and sort their beans (sorted before and after roasting to remove clinkers, stored in a cool dry location before roasting and in airtight containers (with a vent, coffee outgasses like crazy after roasting) after. Ask about their beans, whether they are estate grown, shade grown, fair trade, etc. At the first sign that they don't know what you are talking about, leave.
Now, ask for their freshest beans. Try to get some that have just been roasted. Whole bean only. The difference will amaze you, it's like you are drinking an entirely different beverage. The difference between good gourmet coffee and bad gourmet coffee is actually greater than the difference between gourmet coffee and truck stop coffee.
Most of the complex varietal flavor in coffee comes from the gasses trapped in the beans. These escape withing two days, or about an hour after grinding. So if you want the absolute ultimate cup of coffee, buy some green beans (any good roaster will let you buy green beans) and roast them yourelf. Use a cast iron skillet and stir with a wooden spoon, on the highest heat your stove is capable of. When the beans are a shade or two lighter than you normally like them, pour the beans into another heat-proof container and toss them around a bit to cool them. They will continue to darken as they cool. If you like that, there are personal roasters you can buy for under $150 US that make the process much easier.
Starbucks roast their beans too dark, don't take enough care sorting clinkers, and their coffee is a week old by the time it even gets to the stores. It is NOT good coffee.
I don't understand why they do it. I know they know better. In fact, they used to roast to a "full city" roast, which the best gourmet roasters have always used, and which I prefer to lighter or darker roasts. They've since moved to a French roast, or even an Italian roast, which is too dark for me.
More importantly, from what I understand, they don't do any real pre or post roast QA to remove clinkers, which are light, immature beans that give a grassy or off taste to coffee. They also don't date their roasts like a good gourmet shop will. As 90% of varietal flavor in coffee is gone two days after roasting, this is crucial to enjoying good coffee. When I go to my local roaster, who is an true coffee enthusiast like myself, I just say "Give me a half pound of whatever you just roasted."
OTOH, they are a model of social repsonsibility, treating employees and suppliers well and giving back to the community through charity.
We just set up our own Jabber server. It has been deemed marginally useful. No security risk because it's all in-house. No idle chat risk because it's all logged. Marginally useful for those circumstances when you need a quick answer, you need to see who is available to ask, and a short email or phone call would take too long.
Okay, try this analogy then: You buy some "herbal ecstacy" from an ad in the back of a magazine that claims it is perfectly legal, only to find out that it is real MDMA when the cops bust in your door. "But Officer, I didn't intend to buy E!!!" Do you think you are getting off?
All right, I better just stop, because I'm not a lawyer either, and now I'm making wild guesses.;-)
Has AC called this one? Will "Zong" stop asking questions like "What do you folks think? Has AC called this one? Will "Zong" stop asking questions like "What do you folks think?....
You do know that cpt kangarooski is a lawyer, right? With lots and lots of copyright law experience? Not to disparage you, 'cause I generally find your posts interesting, but my money is on him being right, not you. Admit it: your legal theories are basically just wild guesses. He gets paid good money for his for a reason.
Hey, officer, I bought that hash from Camaroon in good faith! It's legal there, so you can't do a thing! Uh-huh.
There is one major reason why pork is unevenly distributed: the smallest, poorest states get as many senatorial votes as the largest, richest states. The Senate, being the more important and prestigous house, has far more pull on Capitol Hill than the House. The numerous, small, poor states gang up on the rich states in the Senate and take all their tax money. Look at the figures posted in another post responding to yours. You can write them off (and you have, obviously) but your roads/land area theory is not nearly enough to account for the huge disparity. The hilarious thing is that the small, poor states tend to be Republican, and tend to have a strong sense that they are made up of rugged individualists who accept no charity and pull their own weight. In fact, it is the bleeding heart liberal states that financially support the rest of the country.
I'm sure that, in the back of their heads, many poor-staters know this, and this is what fuels their jealous hatred of liberals.
You're just jealous 'cause suckiness is frequently rewarded with assloads of cash while talent is often overlooked. You're probably one of those talented people who naturally think talent deserves reward and suckiness deserves ignominy. What a telent-centric world view. Face it, most of the world's population isn't in the "talented" camp, and if they want to reward suckiness, who are you tell tell them otherwise?
Yeah, earthquakes are so crazy and awesome that they flip out ALL the time. I heard there was this one earthquake that was building up frictional stress. And when some dude dropped a spoon, the earthquake killed the whole town. My friend Mark said that he saw an earthquake totally collapse a building on a kid just because the kid opened a window.
And that's what I call REAL ULTIMATE POWER!!!!!!!!
I can't tell if you are trying to be funny or not, so I'm gonna have to procede as if you were serious. If this was a joke I missed, sorry. The phrase is Buddhist and has nothing to do with the period from the 17th through the 18th centuries in western philosophy known as the enlightenment. It refers to the Buddhist understanding of the interconnectedness of all things and dates back to, well, the beginnings of Buddhism nearly 2,000 years prior to the western conception of the word.
The phrase itself is much more recent. It basically means that enlightenment is nothing special, you have to do certain things before you "get it" and those things still need to be done after. The only difference is who is doing them. Before, you do them. After, you are gone, but they are still done. Who does them? Knowing the interconnectedness and oneness of all things, one understands that one is not an individual in the conventional sense, as "me/not-me" is an arbitrary distinction.
Buddhism is neither metaphysical not esoteric. It deal with the realm of the directly perceivable here and now. It is not based on any special knowledge or secret initiations, but on what each person can know and perceive for themselves.
Bonch is a known troll, he was trolling there so I was trolling him back. As he responded in a reasonable manner, I won't do it again. I love how Repuglicans have people like Anne Coulter on their side spewing venom, and when called on it they claim it was only a joke, but when Libs fight back, you accuse us of being mean-spirited. Seems like a double standard to me...
You were trolling, I trolled back. Seems to have worked. Trolling trolls is fair game in my book. You can call it a joke, but you knew what you were doing. Typical Repug tactics, froth at the mouth until a liberal actually stands up to your inanity, then claim that you were "only joking" and the liberal is the one who is acting crazy.
That being said, I don't really want you to fuck off and die, I hope you have a nice Christmas too and since you took the trouble of writing back in a relativly calm and reasoned manner you are now on my list of people not to troll.
Slashdot Mirror
Gah, stupid fingers, that was supposed to be "preview". Anyway, I'm still a wine snob, meaning I think most wine is shite but I like wine that, well, I like. Follow my advice further up in this thread, my son, and you too shall be reborn as a coffee fanatic.
I'm so sorry for you. Gah, s'like the first time I tasted good wine. As a beer drinker, I thought wine was crap. Then I tasted decent wine and I realized what all the fuss is about. I'm still
Here's an idea, zippy: how's about you slow the fuck down and stop speeding? Yeah, I know, you're the most important person on the road and the rest of us should get the hell out of your way. The cops are just out to get you, it's not that you were doing 80 in a school zone.
Guess what? Speeding is a real crime. Speeders kill more people every year than serial killers do. I'm glad the cops are cracking down on your selfish, speeding ass.
You're everyone's problem. Every time you get behind the wheel of a car, you're unsafe.
What? No, I wasn't just cut off in traffic this morning by some dumb punk in a mustang, causing me to skid on the ice and spill my coffee, and even if I was, I certainly wouldn't be taking my frustration out on random slashdotters. This is a moral issue, yeah, that's it, a moral issue.
To some people, drinking Starbucks is like wearing off-the-shelf. Sure, it's nice for the common man, but what are we effete snobs to do? These are the same people that would wear trash bags with dolls' heads stapled to them if it was in fashion. I'm a coffee gourmand, I like lots and lots of coffee. I happen to like good coffee, and know the difference, but I'm also perfectly happy with a big strong cup of truck-stop special degreaser coffee. Just pack that sucker full of artificial flavor packets and sweetener of some sort and I'm good to go.
I absolutely agree. I lived in Hawaii for a while and drank Kona a fair amount. It's highly overrated, as is Jamaican Blue Maountain. My personal favorite is a nice Guatamalan. That's one you need to drink fresh to appreciate, the spicy notes are all lost after two days.
Starbucks does server their coffee too hot. You'd think they'd have learned from McDonalds' little incident...
Newer is better, although after three days you don't have to worry because it's gotten as bad as it's going to get for weeks. After three days, gourmet coffee will still taste good, but 90% of what differentiates, say, an east African coffee from a central American coffee is gone. That $30/pound Kona or Blue Mountain is now no different than a good $6/pound Columbian.
Some differences, notably body and acidity, will still be there, but the complex and subtle flavors have all evaporated.
A clinker is a lightweight, immature bean that tastes awful. Ever taste rancid, burnt, grassy, or hay-like flavors in coffee? If brewing isn't the problem, those flavors are most likely from clinkers.
That's probably more than you ever wanted to know about coffee. I only know all this because my college girlfriend worked at a REALLY snooty coffe roaster, Willoughby's in New Haven, CT. If you want to try some really good coffee, I think they do mail-order.
Well, the clinker issue is different from roast control. I know Starbucks is pretty good at maintaining a consistent roast, but finding clinkers is only something that can be done on a small scale by experienced individuals. The best farms do a good job of pre-sorting, and the best distributers do another round of sorting, but the best roasters do two more: one before roasting and one after. I'd be willing to bet that Starbucks does sort, but I'd also be willing to bet they only sort out twigs and pebbles before roasting. You can only sort clinkers when using the batch method, continuous methods such as all large scale commercial roasters use do not lend themselves to pawing through beans looking for off-colored ones. In fact, Cooks Illustrated did a coffee comparison, counting the number of clinkers per pound as well as testing to see if people could taste a difference. People can, and Starbucks coffee did not have the lowest ratio of clinkers of the coffee tested.
My advice, find a local coffee roaster that knows what they are doing (most don't). Ask what kind of roaster they use. (Dietrich is good) Ask how they store and sort their beans (sorted before and after roasting to remove clinkers, stored in a cool dry location before roasting and in airtight containers (with a vent, coffee outgasses like crazy after roasting) after. Ask about their beans, whether they are estate grown, shade grown, fair trade, etc. At the first sign that they don't know what you are talking about, leave.
Now, ask for their freshest beans. Try to get some that have just been roasted. Whole bean only. The difference will amaze you, it's like you are drinking an entirely different beverage. The difference between good gourmet coffee and bad gourmet coffee is actually greater than the difference between gourmet coffee and truck stop coffee.
Most of the complex varietal flavor in coffee comes from the gasses trapped in the beans. These escape withing two days, or about an hour after grinding. So if you want the absolute ultimate cup of coffee, buy some green beans (any good roaster will let you buy green beans) and roast them yourelf. Use a cast iron skillet and stir with a wooden spoon, on the highest heat your stove is capable of. When the beans are a shade or two lighter than you normally like them, pour the beans into another heat-proof container and toss them around a bit to cool them. They will continue to darken as they cool. If you like that, there are personal roasters you can buy for under $150 US that make the process much easier.
Starbucks roast their beans too dark, don't take enough care sorting clinkers, and their coffee is a week old by the time it even gets to the stores. It is NOT good coffee.
I don't understand why they do it. I know they know better. In fact, they used to roast to a "full city" roast, which the best gourmet roasters have always used, and which I prefer to lighter or darker roasts. They've since moved to a French roast, or even an Italian roast, which is too dark for me.
More importantly, from what I understand, they don't do any real pre or post roast QA to remove clinkers, which are light, immature beans that give a grassy or off taste to coffee. They also don't date their roasts like a good gourmet shop will. As 90% of varietal flavor in coffee is gone two days after roasting, this is crucial to enjoying good coffee. When I go to my local roaster, who is an true coffee enthusiast like myself, I just say "Give me a half pound of whatever you just roasted."
OTOH, they are a model of social repsonsibility, treating employees and suppliers well and giving back to the community through charity.
if a cow escapes from a cattle farm, it's probably not going to be a threat to nearby people,
"Don't kid yourself Jimmy. If a cow ever got the chance, he'd eat you and everyone you care about!"
--Troy McClure
We just set up our own Jabber server. It has been deemed marginally useful. No security risk because it's all in-house. No idle chat risk because it's all logged. Marginally useful for those circumstances when you need a quick answer, you need to see who is available to ask, and a short email or phone call would take too long.
Okay, try this analogy then: You buy some "herbal ecstacy" from an ad in the back of a magazine that claims it is perfectly legal, only to find out that it is real MDMA when the cops bust in your door. "But Officer, I didn't intend to buy E!!!" Do you think you are getting off?
;-)
All right, I better just stop, because I'm not a lawyer either, and now I'm making wild guesses.
Has AC called this one? Will "Zong" stop asking questions like "What do you folks think? Has AC called this one? Will "Zong" stop asking questions like "What do you folks think?....
Hey, you still have that robe and wizard hat? ;)
You do know that cpt kangarooski is a lawyer, right? With lots and lots of copyright law experience? Not to disparage you, 'cause I generally find your posts interesting, but my money is on him being right, not you. Admit it: your legal theories are basically just wild guesses. He gets paid good money for his for a reason.
Hey, officer, I bought that hash from Camaroon in good faith! It's legal there, so you can't do a thing! Uh-huh.
Hey TMM, long time no post, eh? Welcome back!
Forget about the flying cars, I want my jetpack. Actually, forget the jetpack, I want my Orgasmatron.
There is one major reason why pork is unevenly distributed: the smallest, poorest states get as many senatorial votes as the largest, richest states. The Senate, being the more important and prestigous house, has far more pull on Capitol Hill than the House. The numerous, small, poor states gang up on the rich states in the Senate and take all their tax money. Look at the figures posted in another post responding to yours. You can write them off (and you have, obviously) but your roads/land area theory is not nearly enough to account for the huge disparity. The hilarious thing is that the small, poor states tend to be Republican, and tend to have a strong sense that they are made up of rugged individualists who accept no charity and pull their own weight. In fact, it is the bleeding heart liberal states that financially support the rest of the country.
I'm sure that, in the back of their heads, many poor-staters know this, and this is what fuels their jealous hatred of liberals.
You're just jealous 'cause suckiness is frequently rewarded with assloads of cash while talent is often overlooked. You're probably one of those talented people who naturally think talent deserves reward and suckiness deserves ignominy. What a telent-centric world view. Face it, most of the world's population isn't in the "talented" camp, and if they want to reward suckiness, who are you tell tell them otherwise?
Yes, that was sarcasm.
And pass the hot grit!
Yeah, earthquakes are so crazy and awesome that they flip out ALL the time. I heard there was this one earthquake that was building up frictional stress. And when some dude dropped a spoon, the earthquake killed the whole town. My friend Mark said that he saw an earthquake totally collapse a building on a kid just because the kid opened a window.
And that's what I call REAL ULTIMATE POWER!!!!!!!!
I can't tell if you are trying to be funny or not, so I'm gonna have to procede as if you were serious. If this was a joke I missed, sorry. The phrase is Buddhist and has nothing to do with the period from the 17th through the 18th centuries in western philosophy known as the enlightenment. It refers to the Buddhist understanding of the interconnectedness of all things and dates back to, well, the beginnings of Buddhism nearly 2,000 years prior to the western conception of the word.
The phrase itself is much more recent. It basically means that enlightenment is nothing special, you have to do certain things before you "get it" and those things still need to be done after. The only difference is who is doing them. Before, you do them. After, you are gone, but they are still done. Who does them? Knowing the interconnectedness and oneness of all things, one understands that one is not an individual in the conventional sense, as "me/not-me" is an arbitrary distinction.
Buddhism is neither metaphysical not esoteric. It deal with the realm of the directly perceivable here and now. It is not based on any special knowledge or secret initiations, but on what each person can know and perceive for themselves.
So, yeah, when you tell someone to fuck off and die, I'm going to call you on it.
Can't keep our sock puppet accounts straight, can we Bonch?
Bonch is a known troll, he was trolling there so I was trolling him back. As he responded in a reasonable manner, I won't do it again. I love how Repuglicans have people like Anne Coulter on their side spewing venom, and when called on it they claim it was only a joke, but when Libs fight back, you accuse us of being mean-spirited. Seems like a double standard to me...
You were trolling, I trolled back. Seems to have worked. Trolling trolls is fair game in my book. You can call it a joke, but you knew what you were doing. Typical Repug tactics, froth at the mouth until a liberal actually stands up to your inanity, then claim that you were "only joking" and the liberal is the one who is acting crazy.
That being said, I don't really want you to fuck off and die, I hope you have a nice Christmas too and since you took the trouble of writing back in a relativly calm and reasoned manner you are now on my list of people not to troll.
What we need is some clear cut way of knowing who to hate at the moment. It wouldn't take long, probably not more than two minutes...
[KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK]
Yes?
Who we hate at the moment? I didn't mean that! I know we've always hated Novel, let me go! I'm a loyal Slashbot, I tell you!