Monthly Archives: February 2010

Coffee Notes

★ Posted on at 09:41 am ★

cappucino

It will be a long while before I can achieve coffee art this good. It is all to do with texturing the milk to the right consistency. I find that the milk has to be a certain viscosity for you to pour latte art, so like they say, it should probably look like swirling paint.

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The thing I love about Melbourne, is that you can go to so many places to try food and have new experiences. Was at Proud Mary in Collingwood just to try out the coffee. You walk in and the first thing you’d notice is the 6 group Synesso espresso machine facing the entrance. It’s massive and it would just make any coffee snob drool.

Coffee there’s pretty good, where the milk drinks are all based on a double shot espresso (so they say). Not quite sure what beans were in mine, but the flavour was smooth and clean, with caramel and dark chocolate notes.

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Woke up this morning to make crappy coffee, as the drip from the group head seemed constipated. I was doing everything exactly the same but somehow the coffee didn’t cooperate. Was chatting with my friend online and he was having the same problem, and had made his grind coarser. Did the same and the coffee flowed out nicely, achieving that nice syrupy look when it flows into your cup.

The difference I guess was the humidity. It’s been raining the past couple of days, and I suppose the added moisture makes the coffee grinds a little denser, so keeping it at the grind settings I was using meant that it was a little too fine for the water to push through.

Also experimenting with the milk texturing again. Let the milk coast at the surface a little less and found that the milk, while silky, wasn’t viscous enough to pour art. Previously it was too viscous, so I need to practice a little more to get the right consistency. Heh, I guess the fascination is in the learning and discovering the reasons why. It’s such a fine line between decent coffee and bland extractions.

Lethargy

★ Posted on at 09:50 pm ★

green tea cheese cake

Haven’t been taking any real photos of late. This green tea cheese cake was made by my cousin for her sister’s birthday, who shares the same birthday as my mom. I really should bring along my external flash for all these restaurant shots but while I’d get my ideal lighting solution, it would really destroy the candidness of the occasion, to just celebrate a birthday. We had dinner at Abla’s, a Lebanese restaurant just off Rathdowne St on Elgin St.

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Friday is nearly upon me again, and am looking forward to the weekend to just escape work. Studying has been a change of routine for me. Heh, it always makes my brain go sideways and think of other things. Needed purpose over the last weekend, when I felt like I wasn’t sure of what I wanted to accomplish these days. Taking the time to just take a deep breath, to think things through and have a little prayer, it helps clear the mind and I felt a little more focused by Monday. Studying accounting concepts is rather technical, and since you don’t get feedback like a computer crashing after you’ve tweaked some configuration files, it gets rather boring real quickly.

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Typing this blog post on my Atom PC now. Heh, I think Ubuntu has had its fair run on it, and am thinking of putting Windows on it. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it previously (or I might have regurgitated it in my mind) but as fun as Linux is to play with, it’s always two steps forward, one step back. Samba is broken on Ubuntu 9.10, where you need to restart the service everytime you reboot the computer. As for folder sharing, I’m sure it’s good security, but needing to chmod every folder just so you can access it from your Windows machine is troublesome as well. Arch Linux has bleeding edge stuff ready to roll, but some of the stuff I use isn’t as mainstream, so it’s either not too polished, or still buggy in areas. Windows seems so tempting now, where everything can be configured from dialog boxes (one still needs to know what they are doing) and there are options galore to configure the most necessary items (sure you can tweak everything in Linux, but is there the need to go into minutiae?).

I’d like to spend more time to tweak it until it works the way I want it to, but just trudging through the Internet to find the answers I want is more effort and time than I can spare at the moment. Heh, will try to keep focus on the more important things in life.

Distractions

★ Posted on at 09:30 pm ★

cpa

Flipped open my notes today to do a little studying and it didn’t really go too well. Getting distracted a little too easily these days. Just need to get the momentum going and I should be fine with studying.

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Due to nostalgia, just happy to lie in bed with a book in hand. Just finished reading Starship Troopers. Heh, I remember watching the movie and it left quite an impression on it. Thinking back now it’s kind of silly how technically advanced people have become and they still send hordes of infantry with little armour and a machine gun against giant bugs?

The book is fairly different, spending a little time between the battlefield and in the classroom. For a science fiction book written in 1959 about the future, the credibility of the technology and storyline hold up pretty well. Since I managed to obtain the book from The Book Depository for less than AUD$10, I’d just thought I’d purchase it (considering I have spent $10 on more frivolous things).

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There have been some recent changes in the work place of late, a high level resignation within my department. I’ve seen my fair share of people being fired, retrenched, or just resigning and have become jaded with the process. Heh, wondering what my job prospects are, having looked at some job ads online. Maybe I’ve had a little more experience in a different area and maybe I’m feeling a little more confident with my skillset and what I can offer. I feel like I could take on more responsibility in different jobs. It’s been a little more than a year and a quarter since I’ve joined the hospital I’m working in and unfortunately, eventhough the organisation is huge, there is very little scope to move to a non finance area, unless I’d like to take up medicine. Heh, so maybe before the end of the year I’d like a change of environment? Having a CPA would help with other jobs, as the certification of being a properly qualified accountant would help with different roles. I find myself more intrigued with the management accounting type of work, looking at budgets, doing analysis etc. Feeling a little stagnant at the moment.

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Just looking through last year’s posts around this time of year. I was already looking at houses then, so glad that’s over. Work has changed from challenging to routine, which is something I find fairly common at this end of the spectrum. Heh, the one thing that hasn’t really changed is that I’m still easily distracted.