My painstakingly restored (by me) vintage La Pavoni works well for me with Bluebottle coffee. I think the high temperature of this machine's grouphead and water, suits the darker Italian style roasts they do. For me, Ritual and Fourbarrel are too fruity and not roasted to the point of exuding oils that work well with a long high-temp hand pull. You can see this by simply comparing the beans of each roast visually - Bluebottle's espresso roasts are dark in uniform, sweating oils slightly - Ritual and Fourbarrel's are lighter and speckled with a light streak in the fold between the two lobes. I haven't tried Sightglass yet (and those 4 currently wrap up the top espresso blend producers in San Francisco's coffee wars).
Alongside discovery of all of that, I've been working on my latte art, as the picture above shows. Great coffee is one of life's lasting pleasures, along with many things you ingest and make a part of your body I believe they should be as good as you can get them (economics prevailing). Latte art is just fun though. Here's how to steam the milk so as to get micro-foam for latte art, and a few of the “arts” courtesy of Brooklynshot :)
Had some troubles with Office 2007 files not being downloadable on our windows servers … did a bit of Googling and found this nice list of Office 2007 mime-types:
.docm,application/vnd.ms-word.document.macroEnabled.12 .docx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document .dotm,application/vnd.ms-word.template.macroEnabled.12 .dotx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.template .potm,application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.template.macroEnabled.12 .potx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.template .ppam,application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.addin.macroEnabled.12 .ppsm,application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.slideshow.macroEnabled.12 .ppsx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slideshow .pptm,application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.presentation.macroEnabled.12 .pptx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation .xlam,application/vnd.ms-excel.addin.macroEnabled.12 .xlsb,application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.binary.macroEnabled.12 .xlsm,application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.macroEnabled.12 .xlsx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet .xltm,application/vnd.ms-excel.template.macroEnabled.12 .xltx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.template
Adding all mime-types to IIS in one step is very simple:
The easiest way to do this is stopping IIS and editing the metabase XML file (C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv\MetaBase.xml) using a text editor. Search for the
<IIsMimeMap Location="/LM/MimeMap" …>element and append the lines above to theMimeMapattribute
(from Bram Van Damme, http://www.bram.us/2007/05/25/office-2007-mime-types-for-iis/)
I see all this, but quite candidly, after futzing with Windows IIS for about 40 minutes earlier today I'm having better cross-platform (on the client) success with application/octet-stream instead. This just sends the file to the client, which works out what kind of file it is by itself and then treats it appropriately. So...
.docx,application/octet-stream
.xlsx,application/octet-stream
.pptx,application/octet-stream
that's all I added to this IIS Server's metabase config. Just in case that helps you somewhere.
Our friend Jeff was gracious enough to cook a bird for the misfits Thanksgiving we're hosting. Bird just came out - time to rest 30 minutes and then it's tucker time!
Larry King (I'm assuming the one from CNN) said "the greatest show I've ever seen". Awesome! I'm not much of a horse person but, excited nonetheless. Impressions later...
Acquisitions in technology companies often have far-reaching effects, and here's another one I hadn't expected - and no doubt the MobileMe team at Apple had some fun challenges with. It's been relatively well known for some time that MobileMe's underpinnings (not to say the middleware and apps layers that we interact with, as those have a clear Apple face on them) have long been Sun's Java System Messaging Server.
Right up until the wee hours of November 12th, 2010, that held true as far as I can tell. As of my first email received through MobileMe on Nov 12th however, the backend has been swapped out for Oracle's Communications Messaging Exchange Server. I make no representation about this swap other than to note that it's likely another effect of the Sun acquisition, and to remind people that Oracle didn't just become a hardware company - they also got Sun's customers in all sorts of arenas. This is easy to forget when you're looking at M&A from the outside, and it's easy to miss if you've never been in M&A deals.
Oracle's server here offers a lot to enterprise messaging apps and it may well be a benefit to Apple's ops team, for now. It's also worth noting that so far, MobileMe users haven't noticed any defects as a result of the swap. Apple hate having little control however, and there is also another aspect that leads me to believe that there'll be no free MobileMe anytime soon - Oracle doesn't give away it's products - you and I and all of us MobileMe subscribers, are paying the attendant licensing fees. So Larry, I'm expecting a call to go racing on that yacht of yours soon; anytime now whilst the Bay Area weather is still good, is fine by me.
Clearly this doesn't happen too often. What I found interesting is that the cleaners are having to use a lengthy process and glass polish to remove the watermarks of a number of years. I hope they're billing on a T&M basis, for their sakes.
Giants fans crowding the streets celebrating and shouting down here at Berry and 5th. With a couple of small fires going at 3rd and King, now's a great time to stay off the streets. Party peacefully folks!
Movie night. Cinema sized beer. Perfect.
San Francisco's Giants won the first game of 7 at their home stadium, 2 blocks from my house last night. This city is going baseball crazy - good for them :)))