It's very muggy this morning. Why would it not be? It rained all night off and on. Maybe it accumulated a couple of inches. I didn't have much e-mail this morning because I changed the settings of one of the discussion groups I am subscribed to read it on the internet home page instead of from my Inbox, so all the e-mail I got this morning was all about the changes brought about by the new Snow Leopard Operating System from the AppleScript mailing list. Its my suspicion that I'm being conned into believing Snow Leopard is a big deal for people who use Apple products, and I believe it.
Moving into 64-bit computing across the board IS a big move for the whole digital community and comparable in it's technical problems to changing television from analog signals to digital signals. The results are not that startling or different, but getting those results has more range and scope. It's been underway for a long time, and even now it will take a fairly long time for the dust to settle.
The main drawing card of going to all this trouble is that it practically removes the limits of how much DRAM can be employed for a desktop operating system. The situation has changed from not being able to use more than 2-4 gigabytes of DRAM on a regular home computer to using way over a billion gigabytes.
That's the big deal about 64-bit computing. There are other advantages, but unless you're an IT professional they really don't matter, but the amount of DRAM that can be employed is key. Presently, in my highly ignorable technical expertise, Samsung just started making 32 gigabyte DRAM chips. That means that if I had deep enough pockets to buy two of these 32 gigabyte chips from Samsung and put them into the two memory slots I have on my Mac Mini, I'd have more DRAM on my Apple box than I have data on my hard drive.
Of course, since I haven't learned enough AppleScript to have an opinion one way or the other about the changes wrought in AppleScript by the new operating system, its not that big a deal for me one way or the other. I'm busy reading away though, trying to keep up with something that I never caught on to.
I wrote the other day about getting my legs tangled up in the bedsheets and falling to the floor while I was getting up to relieve myself a month or so ago, and I've had some discomfort in my left hip ever since. Everything that needs to be there to assist me with thinking that I've broken my hip has been right to to worry hell outta me. Then, a couple of nights ago I was doing some yoga to see if I couldn't stretch the muscles around the sore spot, and I experience a sharp POP! in one of the vertebrae in my lower back.
I knew at the time that either the soreness in my hip was gonna get better or maybe worse, and I had to wait a couple of days to find out which one. I'm getting more sure as time goes by it's getting better. The fall just popped something outta whack, and the yoga stretching popped it back into place again. At least, that's what I hope has happened.
In the past, when I read about coffee and how to get a better cup of it, I encountered a type o coffee pot I wasn't familiar with. It's called a French Press. As I read about it I got the impression that it might be a better mousetrap, but I didn't wanna risk my CC numbers with some group I've never done business with, and the price was fairly prohibitive as I remember it.
I was in Wal-Mart shopping for another coffee carafe to replace the fairly new one that broke recently. Both the old one and the new one broke at the same spot. On the curve transition from the side of the glass pot to the bottom. These carafes are manufactured from tempered glass, and are usually very strong and reliable. The bottom curve must be a design weakness. The problem for me is that the replacement pot cost almost as much as a whole new coffee maker.
I decided I might as well buy a new coffee pot, and was looking through the selection sot before me on the display shelves. On the bottom shelf I saw a weird looking glass thingie that caught my attention because of the label on it. "French Press". The first thing I did was look at the price label on the shelf edge beneath where it sot, and it said $19.95. Twenty bucks, and I could find out whether this deal worked for me or not. Sold!
This happened around nine o'clock at night. I didn't really wanna fix a cup of coffee this late to see if this dealeo worked for me. By the ti-me I got ho-me, however, my curiosity was too much to bear. Without washing it or anything I put some water on to boil, took the lid off the gadget, measured out the regular amount of coffee and dumped it into the bottom of the glass container.
While I was waiting fer my billy to bile I took a look at the "press" part of the French Press Coffee Maker. I've never seen one up close, and this was to be my introduction. It's a very simple design. It's like the old hand pitcher water pumps, except in this case the cylinder is made of glass, not cast-iron. The plunger doesn't have a leather seal at the bottom to push the liquid up through the relief valve.
Instead of the plunger forcing the water to go anywhere with a seal and a flap, it's made of very fine stainless steel mesh that allows the hot water that's poured in on top of the coffee grounds to pass through it, while keeping the coffee grounds to the bottom of the glass cylinder. Then, when I poured the results into my coffee cup, the grounds stayed in the bottom of the pot due to the stainless steel screen.
It tasted wonderful. Since there is not fiber filter like there is with a Mister Coffee style coffee pot, there is a little sediment from the grounds at the bottom of my cup when I'm done. Like there used to be when we made coffee with a percolator style pot, but without all that noise and the bitterness associated with repetitively running the same water through the same grounds. It's more like the results of simply boiling some water and throwing the grounds into it, and straining the grounds out while it's being poured.
I gotta get a bigger tempered glass container to use to heat the water in the microwave oven. The one cup tempered measuring cup I have now doesn't have enough room to make a full mug of coffee after part of it is absorbed by the coffee grounds during the making process. A cup and a half container of water brought to a boil in the microwave in three minutes should do the trick.
Description-wise, This is a much neater way for a single person or a couple to make coffee. Especially during the clean-up afterward. I just washed the stainless steel screen of the plunger off, rinsed out the glass cylinder, and sat it on the shelf where it takes up less space, doesn't need a electric outlet or wires on the counter top, and looks more elegant there than a cheap plastic doodad. All for $20. Now I know. It's all I ask or have ever.
My sister-in-law came just drove by to tell me that the oldest daughter of my second-wife gave birth to a boy child. Genetically, I guess that means I'm a grandfather again, but it hurts a little to always be the last to know, and to know that I'll never see this child or allowed any input to his development. This mother's daughter's sister never bothered to tell me she had a child for years. I only learned incidentally through somebody else then too. I guess i should have been a better person. The problem being, of course, is a little matter of whose idea of "better" instead of my own was I expected to choose from.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
