I love coffee. LOOOOVE coffee. If I could, I’d drink coffee all day. Unfortunately my trainer and body think it’s better for me to drink a lot of water, and not as much Blood of Life™.

I thought I’d put together a short guide on how I like to make coffee, along with some “optional” steps if you are trying to be extra fancy. My preferred method does involve some equipment that you may not have already, but trust me, it will be worth it. I have been spending time at Starbuck’s lately while I’m out on my bike. That shiz is expensive! If you just save your money you’d otherwise spend on a regular coffee or Americano-type drink then you should be able to afford most of this in short order.

Part One: The Coffee Maker
Coffee makers are fucking complicated these days. Internal water filters, different basket types, different heating elements, built-in grinder, built-in thermal carafes, timers, digital clocks, GPS, space-based laser guiding, holy shit. The best coffee maker I own was $39 from Target. The next best coffee maker I’ve ever owned was a $10 generic blue-box special I bought … also at Target. Hrm. Maybe someone at Target also likes coffee.

Regardless if you like your coffee machine plain white, stainless steel, robotic, demonic, hypnotic, whatever, your coffee machine must have a cone-shaped filter. This is an absolute must, as cone-shaped filters result in a more even brewing process. Basket-shaped filters will not fully and equally distribute enough water through the grounds, resulting in an inconsistent taste.

Another nice feature to have is a stainless steel heating element. My current coffee machine has this, and it brews the coffee at a higher temperature than conventional copper heating elements found in most coffee makers. The ideal brewing temperature of coffee is between 190 – 205 degrees F.

Part Two: Garbage In, Garbage Out
The water you put into your coffee machine is very important. Brewed coffee is 90% water, so if you are pulling water straight from your tap you’re going to get inconsistent-tasting coffee. Even if your tap water tastes “good,” it will have impurities that may influence each pot you throw. Well water is a great example of this — even though it tastes much better on average than tap water, it has all sorts of minerals in it. We use a conventional Brita filter here at the house, an idea system would be an in-counter ceramic reverse osmosis purifier. Regardless of the source, use cold water.

I always, always, always brew 10 cups of coffee. Don’t brew 4. Don’t brew 12. Brew 10. I measure out four level coffee scoops (that’s 8 tablespoons) per 10 cups of water, as indicated by the carafe. The worst thing you can do is fuck with your ratio of water to coffee. You may want to adjust the amount of coffee you put in the filter basket, based on if you like strong or weak coffee, or if you are brewing a dark or light roast, or depending on the bean variety. Stick with 10 cups of water always, at least one thing will be constant. Consistency is the key to good tasting coffee.

Part Three: Grind Like a Teenage Girl in Aruba
Grind your beans as close as you can before brewing. If you have leftover ground coffee, store it in an air-tight container out of direct sunlight. DO NOT store your coffee, in bean or ground form, in the freezer. The moisture in the coffee will freeze and your coffee will suffer. This is a common mistake.

Here’s where things can get expensive. Don’t use a traditional $10 – 20 “chopper” style coffee blender to grind your coffee. As explained in my Solis Maestro Plus coffee mill review, you need to own a conical burr grinder coffee mill to get a consistent grind. My Solis was about $150, however you can find lesser quality (but still serviceable) grinders from places like … Target. Hrm.

Part Four: Filters
This isn’t such a big deal, but I figured it was worth mentioning. I use the Earth-unfriendly bleached white paper filters. I have used unbleached filters in the past, and I have used filters made out of recycled baby diapers or whatever in the past also. I have also tried the metal-foil reusable filters. The metal filters suck, and I couldn’t tell the difference between the three types of paper filters, except for the slight taste of baby powder while using the recycled ones. Just kidding. We buy our filters in bulk from Costco. It’s like $5 for a hojillion. If you want to be a real coffee snob, pre-moisten your filter before adding the grounds. This way your machine doesn’t have to use water to wet the filter that would otherwise go towards brewing the coffee.

Part Five: Heat is the Enemy
The heat from the hot plate on your coffee maker begins to break down your lovingly-crafted brew immediately. As soon as possible, move your coffee to a glass-lined thermal carafe. The stainless steel versions suck. They won’t keep your coffee for hot nearly as long, and I swear I can taste the metal when coffee is stored inside a stainless steel carafe. The absolute worst vessel is plastic lined. Yuck.

Make sure you pre-heat your glass-lined carafe with hot water while your coffee is brewing. Otherwise you will cool your coffee as it heats up the inside of the carafe. Your coffee will also stay hotter longer if you pre-heat the carafe. The ideal temperature at which to drink coffee is between 170 and 180 degrees F. Lady Jaye likes her coffee cooler, but for me, the hotter the better.

The glass-lined coffee pot I own was a $10 Thermos brand job I bought at Target (holy shit, are they a cult?). I have permanently benched my two stainless steel restaurant-style carafes. I would only use those if company couldn’t be trusted to not break the glass inside the Thermos.

Whew, I guess that’s it. To summarize:

• Use a coffee machine with a cone-shaped filter.
• Always use cold, filtered/bottled water. Always use 10 cups of water.
• Mill your coffee from room-temperature beans using a conical burr mill as closely as you can to when you brew your coffee.
• Transfer the finished pot of coffee to a glass-lined thermal container as soon as possible.
• Try not to spill that shit on your crotch. It hurts. Trust me.

Monopoly, one of my favorite board games (both for gameplay and as a cheap personality test) is getting an update. As written about a few days ago in this Ars Technica article, Hasbro intends to update the properties on the board with modern US equivalents and more market-current prices. I guess this means they will revamp the money system as well …. I cringe to imagine the satisfaction on Stilts’ face if he had to count out $20,000 with $1 bills.

If you can endure the Flash presentation, there is an online vote being held at Hasbro.com to help determine what the new properties will be. I personally hope that Park Place is replaced with Hollywood or Rodeo Drive.

My days seem kinda boring after ordering FIOS; I don’t have to check the online availability page every twenty minutes like I used to. Luckily, Verizon has made up another fun mini-game for me to play, which is cleverly entitled “Document how frequently your FIOS connection drops.” Since I started keeping track on April 12, I’ve had nine outages. This is a big deal to me, since I work from home and also have a VOIP telephone used for work-related gibber jabber. I am waiting until I drop out of a WebEx I am hosting because my connection takes a dump.

The good news is the outages last for four minutes or less. The bad news is that there is no other apparently pattern to the outages. They have taken place at any time from 5:00AM all through the day and back around to 12:38AM. When I called Verizon to report the problem, I actually had an outage while I was waiting on hold with Verizon.

I have been holding off canceling my cable modem until the outages level off. Verizon has yet to provide me with an answer as to why my service sucks. The gentleman in the support center, of course, swore up and down that I was the only person he’d ever heard of with so many outages. I think what may actually be happening is that I’m one of the only customers who sit at their computers for 14 hours a day to notice :)

One of the unfortunate by-products of doing cardio at the gym is that I watch more network television than I do normally. The doubly unfortunate part about it is that at least one television in view is showing either the local news or FOX news, or CNN, or whatever half-real, half-make believe bullshit is on for kiddie-minded adults.

So while I was trapped on the eliptical machine two days ago, FOX was running a bit about the national debt. You know, that big-ass series of red numbers that keeps growing every year. When asked what he thought about reducing the national debt, the “analyst” said that the debt wasn’t a big deal. After all, he said, we’ve had a national debt for 20 years and the sky hasn’t fallen yet. While that is certainly the reality, I think that’s a pretty shitty answer and a poor example for fiscal responsibility.

Cue CNN later the same evening, which was on while Lady Jaye and I went to our favorite diner. CNN’s big story was how we are raising “Generation Debt,” a ha-ha catchy name for the current crop of US citizens faced with crappy job propositions, a very high cost of living, and a higher cost for education. Add all that to a consumer-driven culture, and that adds up to a big debt. Of course, CNN was quick to bash on the youngest generations for their financial irresponsibility, and how their wayward spending would lead to the downfall of civilization as we know it.

If it’s OK for the government to run up a big tab with no intent on paying it back, what’s wrong for its citizens to do the same? I guess the dichotomy just pisses me off.

This level 1 rant brought to you by: an acerbic jackass

I love, love, love the online music service Pandora.com. I listen to the station for a few hours a day at least. One thing I have wanted, however, is to play my Pandora station when I am downstairs, either playing cards with Lady Jaye or cooking, whatever. Short of running another PC downstairs, however, we are going to be sans Pandora, or any streaming music, or any tunes from our MP3 collection.

That is, until I saw the Squeezebox offered by Slim Devices.

This attractive device connects to your home stereo and wireless streams music from audio sources. It features all sorts of nifty tech, such as the fast 802.11g wireless network protocol, high-tech (but unusable to me) A/V outputs like Digital Coax and Digital Optical, and a remote control. It also plays just about any audio format under the sun, including FLAC, WAV, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and WMA. When you purchase a Squeezebox you get three months of Pandora for free.

I am really digging on the Squeezebox concept. There are other competing devices, but none of them are integrated with my beloved Pandora. Too bad it’s $300, and I have other things to spend my money on.

Squeezebox, I pine for thee.

I don’t normally do movie reviews, because I feel that what I like about a movie differs quite dramatically from what normal people like. I have some basic requirements before I’ll see a movie, although there are a few notable exceptions. A movie must have at least one:

• Monster
• Shootout/brawl
• Aliens
• Car chase

At any rate, even if I find folks who like movies that I like, I tend not to discuss particular films with them until we’ve all seen it. If someone asks me what I thought of Movie Such-and-Such, I just say, “Go see it,” or “Rent it,” or “Naw. HELL NAW.” With that in mind, I present Brothers Grimm and Lucky Number Slevin to the DrFaulken cinematic crucible.

Brothers Grimm: rented via Netflix, I hereby have weighed your merits and found you horribly, horribly wanting. Naw. HELL NAW.

Lucky Number Slevin: it reminds me of two of my favorite movies combined, and features some of my favorite performers. If you like action films with plot twists, Go see it.

It’s been less than a month since I posted faceless pictures of myself as a benchmark for my workout sessions. After my last fat-pinching, I had Lady Jaye take some updated pictures.

The last rev of pictures are on the top in each group.

The front

The differences are subtle, and I’m not talking about the awful lighting. You can see my hip bones a lot better now, and I’ve started (slowly) to add some mass to my chest. Despite going up in strength quite a bit in the last month, my arms and shoulders still look about the same.

The back

From this angle, it looks like I’ve thinned out quite a bit. Either my back is becoming more muscular again, or I’m just shedding some of the center fat.

The side

Okay, admittedly I cheated last time and stuck my stomach out a bit, but nevertheless you can see some improvement from the side, also. I apologize for facing the opposite way. The one thing I immediately noticed was HOW AWFUL my swayback has gotten. Sitting for 14+ hours is really messing up my posture. How do I fix this? Holy shit!

Okay, that’s enough for now. Hopefully we can do this again in a month and there will be even more improvement.

Has anyone gotten rid of a CRT monitor? More or less legally isn’t too big of an issue for me. If I can do anything short of dumping it in the river I will. I am afraid the answer will be “take it to the county dump and pay them $50 to get rid of it,” at which point I might just put it outside of the house on the curb with a “FO’ FREE” sign. If so, I’ll try to videotape anyone attempted to carry it off. This thing weighs a ton!

Sometimes I feel like life imitates art a little too closely. Just like in Flash Gordon in the 80s, someone has been playing with the weather machine out here. It was 87 degrees and sunny one day last week, now it’s in the 50s and rainy less than four days later. It’s supposed to be 73 tomorrow, and then up to 84 on Thursday. Just in time for it to be rainy again on Friday, which rules out taking the bike up to Maryland again. At least I can take the Solstice up this time.

With less than two weeks to go to hit my 3000 mile mark, I hope that the weather levels out a bit. I’m going to need to make some longer-distance rides in order to meet my goal.

Total winter miles:+1200 miles

I’ve had my Microsoft Elite ergonomic keyboard for about four or five years now. I’ve always clocked in many hours in front of the keyboard, but now that I work from home I’m probably on-key for 14+ hours a day. The result of this activity is a very nasty keyboard that was begging for a replacement.

Before

Now, I wasn’t ready to just throw the keyboard in the trash. I had read a guide about how to clean your keyboard in the dish washer. Would it work? Who knows — but if I was due for a new keyboard anyway, why not give it a shot?

I unscrewed the keyboard and took it apart. Following the directions from Rabid Hardware carefully, I laid aside the thin plastic sheets, the LEDs, the rubber strip, and the PCB + PS/2 jack. I washed the membranes by hand, and the rest of the hard plastic went into the dish washer. I ran the machine on “light,” and waited for my experiment to complete.

The dish washer completed its cycle. I wasn’t expecting anything bad, but I was happy to see that my keyboard pieces weren’t melted to shit. Unlike the author of the Rabid Hardware guide, I did not have any compressed air, so I had to air dry the key clusters overnight.

I have to say, it came out pretty well — only the deep-rooted coffee stain remained.

I reassembled the keyboard with trepidation. Had I killed my long-time companion? I noticed that the LEDs had come detached from the plastic sheets. I was worried that they wouldn’t work when I put everything back together. The reassembly took less than five minutes, and I eagerly plugged my newly-washed keyboard back into my workstation.

Nothing.

Hrm. Maybe the computer was having a hard time recognizing the keyboard via the PS/2 port. I rebooted using the mouse.

Nothing.

I did a full shut down.

Nothing.

I tried Lady Jaye’s keyboard.

Nothing.

Oh damn. At least it wasn’t my keyboard: I managed to kill the PS/2 port by plugging and unplugging the keyboard while the computer was still on. Once my heart started beating again, I dug out a PS/2 to USB converter and plugged my keyboard into my motherboard. Everything worked fine — including my LEDs :)

Final score: Clean keyboard 1, PS/2 Port 0