“Anyone who takes this seriously deserves to.”
— Donna BarrPod People
At 9:45 AM on Sunday, I ordered some more coffee pods from Nespresso’s web site, enough to get free shipping and the one-time $10 discount that came with my machine. They arrived at 9:45 AM on Tuesday.
I hadn’t expected that kind of service, so when I’d gone out to the grocery store, I’d bought three flavors of Peet’s and one of Gevalia (which, naturally-but-sadly, wasn’t the sort that comes with a mocha froth packet).
The sampler had told me that I was more interested in the Lungo form-factor than the Espresso, so that’s what I’d mostly ordered online. Neither Peet’s nor Gevalia sells a dedicated lungo, but all of the Peet’s seem to work fine at that size with a Moo and a Splenda or two, or sugar-free Torani and some milk. The most striking characteristic of the Gevalia pods is the fine grounds that end up in the cup; their pods are compostable rather than recyclable, and I think the caps just puncture differently when you load them. The end product tastes a bit thinner, as well, at least in the “Luminous” flavor; it does not work as a lungo pour (he says, disguising the fact that he doesn’t speak even Coffee Italian, and just means pressing the Large button instead of the Small one).
Also, it turns out the Essenza Mini has three drip trays, one of which is “my countertop”. With the Keurig, I’m used to just topping off the water reservoir while it’s still attached to the machine, rather than carrying it over to the filtered-water dispenser on the fridge (which it doesn’t fit into anyway). The Mini’s reservoir has an odd little locking system that requires you to tilt it away from the body of the unit to open the lid, which breaks the seal at the bottom.
Net result, if you try to refill it in place, it will slowly leak until it’s firmly reseated, leaving a small puddle on the counter.
By the way, browsing the Nespresso sub-reddit revealed another downside to their long-dripping pod design: mold. Not just the potential for it to form if you don’t rinse out the pod-catcher and drip trays, but the apparent inevitability of it if you go along with Nespresso’s recycling system, which involves collecting about a hundred pods at a time and sending them off in their free prepaid mailers.
The recommended way to avoid mold is to store the used pods in your freezer until you have enough to fill the mailer.
Related, I hacked on the OpenSCAD source for this pod-holder design to make a version that would fit on my 3D printer, stand up on its own, and not take 8+ hours to print, even with a 0.3mm layer height. STL file here; I might refactor the code to use the BOSL library for everything and upload it as a remix, now that Thingiverse acknowledges my existence.
One thing that Nespresso has really done better than Keurig is make the products attractive and stylish, including the consumables. People buy and make elaborate display stands because the pods are pretty.
Isekai: 1.5
I’d heard that bugs were a good source of protein. I’d never planned to test it, but the thing about paleo diets is that they’re the only option when you suddenly end up living paleo. My crazy redheaded kidnapper had dumped me in the middle of Outer Bumfuck Forest, completely naked and armed only with a post-it note.
What was it with this chick and notes, anyway?
This one was long on drama and short on details, but it covered the basics: Hero good, Demon Lord bad, five months until the big fight. Nothing about finding food, shelter, weapons, or pants.
With wilderness skills that would make a Cub Scout sneer, it was quite a while before I had basic survival covered and could focus on exploring my new world. And it definitely was a new world, because the first time the sky was clear at night, I discovered that the moon had a ring around it.
Which meant she wasn’t crazy, and I was dead. Back home, anyway; here, I was definitely alive, or I wouldn’t have been so cold and hungry.
(I’m up to just under 6,000 words on this, by the way; hopefully I’m not the only one amused by it)
(also, I finally found out what she is, when I hit 5,000 words)
Isekai: 1.4
She was gone in the morning, leaving only a note that said we’d meet again once I was safely dead, and a huge mess in the kitchen that said she was only vaguely acquainted with the concept of cooking.
Three weeks later, I’d almost forgotten about her. I mean, she was right about it having been the greatest night of my life, but the details just seemed to slip away, like I wasn’t supposed to remember her. No one else did.
So it came as a bit of a shock to wake up with her on top of me, with the action already in progress. It was some time before I noticed that we weren’t in my apartment. Or anywhere else familiar. Or even indoors. In fact, I was lying on a slab of rock in the middle of a forest, wearing nothing but a satisfied-looking redhead.
“Welcome back from the dead, hero! Ready to save the world?”
“Is that where I get to be on top?”
“Eventually. I brought you here so that you can get ready to defeat the Demon Lord and his army. Here, I wrote everything down.”
This time I saw her vanish. Couldn’t miss it, really, since we were still attached.
Isekai: 1.3
There is a great wisdom handed down across generations, from father to son, from brother to brother: never stick it in crazy. In this case, crazy was a natural redhead with the most lick-able freckles I’d ever seen, scattered across a very healthy figure.
“Are you planning to kill me with those?”
“Only metaphorically; I don’t know precisely how it happens, just that it’s certain, it’s tomorrow, and that if I choose, you’ll rise again to serve my needs.”
“That’s more of a double entendre than a metaphor.”
“Do you want to fuck me before you die, or not?”
I stuck it in crazy. I lost count of how many times I rose to serve her needs.
Coffee spiders
Supply, Chained
I am no longer short on liquid pie. Last week I spotted a marketplace dealer whose price on Gevalia Mocha Latte k-cups was sensible, and today my monthly subscription arrived on schedule and without a surprise cancellation, so I’ve got nearly a three-month supply, with the earliest expiration date in November. I still haven’t seen it in stores, but Corona-chan was bad for variety in a lot of areas, and I think big-chain buyers are still playing it safe.
Usually I limit myself to one of these per day, and with the supply uncertain, sometimes less, but now the only thing holding me back is the calorie count. Which is reasonable (110, with two Mini-Moos), but still adds up during cold* weather.
(* for the California coast)
Continuing with my recent trend of Amazon shipping fails, one of the 36 k-cups in this shipment somehow managed to burst, spilling finely-ground coffee everywhere. Fortunately the boxes were in a sealed outer bag, but I had to open them all up and wipe down every k-cup and froth packet. There was no sign of rough handling, so I’m inclined to believe it was that way before it left the warehouse, and whatever human or robot did the packing didn’t notice or care.
Another coffee machine!
Despite money burning a hole in my pocket, I managed to keep myself to only one new toy, a Nespresso Essenza Mini espresso machine. I worked my way through the supplied variety pack of coffees, and, taken straight, I honestly can’t tell the difference between most of them. Maybe it’s just that they all seem to be darker roasts, but the high-pressure extraction method produces less-distinguishable flavors than my Aeropress.
So far they’ve all responded well to Splenda and Mini-Moos, though, and their “Fortissio Lungo” topped off with whole milk turned out quite nicely. I don’t have a milk frother or steamer, and I don’t plan to buy one any time soon; that just seems like work. I usually only buy milk for cooking and baking, and for the past year I’ve gotten into the habit of buying UHT whole milk in 8-ounce lunch-packs, to avoid supply-chain disruptions while keeping it from going bad on me.
I didn’t have any actual demitasse cups in the house, but a saké ochoko will hold an espresso shot, and the larger thick-walled ceramic guinomi set I picked up cheap at Daiso has room left over for a Moo, and holds the heat nicely.
After having lived with k-cups for a number of years, the biggest surprise with the Nespresso machine is how much, and for how long, liquid drips into its two drip pans afterwards. I’ve never had to empty a k-cup drip pan, only give it a quick rinse when I’m cleaning the kitchen.
Chicks In Chains
Coming back from a trip to the Nob Hill south of town, I was pleasantly surprised to see nearly-completed new construction at the local mall. I hadn’t known that Chik-Fil-A was coming to town, but I’d expected it to happen eventually. The hate-fueled campaign to destroy them backfired big-time, and they’ve greatly expanded their presence in California since then. They’ve been putting in stores north, south, and east of me, so it was only a matter of time before Salinas got one.
Interesting that they skipped Morgan Hill and Gilroy, especially with the big outlet mall, but maybe the timing just lined up better with the construction at my mall.
Doin’ whatever a spider kin
I’m still idly watching That Spider Show, and episode 7 was the first time I didn’t actively hate the crew of the B Ark. Well, some of them, anyway. For a few minutes.
Undocumentation
The 3D printer nozzle that arrived yesterday was for an experiment that I can’t really start yet. I’ve built up a pretty solid Cura profile for the Dremel 3D45 with the standard 0.4mm nozzle, and I thought I’d come to understand its inheritance system, but I just can’t get the damn thing to locate the correct quality profiles when I add variant nozzle sizes into the mix.
It seems to require a config file for each (material, nozzle, quality) tuple, but when I generate them with a script, it can’t find a match, and the log messages are not helpful. The only good thing is that it’s not complaining that they’re corrupt and asking to reset everything to defaults.
It would be significantly less work to just generate a completely separate config for a “3D45-0.8” model printer.
UnDirecTV
I officially no longer owe AT&T for the DirecTV equipment that I immediately returned after canceling my account. The proof is that they sent me the money I’ve been owed since November. On an $8.79 prepaid Mastercard debit card that I have to figure out a use for.
Secure By Design
I’m just going to leave this here:
“…the malicious package is said to leverage the macOS Installer JavaScript API”
I find this approximately as comforting as if they’d said, “the Installer’s PHP-based SQL interface”.
Isekai: 1.2
Naturally she skipped out without paying. One moment she was eating her third tofu-and-artichoke pizza, the next she was gone. Which was odd, since I’d been checking her out every thirty seconds for the past hour. Mostly because she was a very enthusiastic eater and wasn’t wearing underwear, just a skimpy little outfit that walked the fine line between party dress and party favor.
Maybe I should have noticed that her dress had no room to hide a wallet, but the things it was hiding, barely, were a lot more interesting. She did leave a note behind that read “see you soon”, which was both promising and a bit worrying.
I checked the street outside, but there was no sign of her. I asked the three other customers if they’d seen which way she went, but they’d barely noticed she was there. It wasn’t until I got off work that I found out where she’d disappeared to: my apartment. More specifically, my shower, which she was coming out of as I walked in. Naked. Her, not me.
“You owe me $47, lady.”
“Think of it as buying me dinner first, so we can move on to the greatest night of your life. Also the last.”
Dear Amazon,
I received two packages today. The first was a lightly-padded envelope shipped UPS, containing a nozzle, so small that it took me a while to find it. I honestly thought the envelope was empty at first.
The second was a large cardboard box containing a few token air pillows for padding, along with three Bluray discs and a cast iron griddle. Only one of the Bluray cases was damaged by the five pounds of cast iron bouncing around in the box, but it looks like the actual discs survived the experience.
Isekai: 1.1
It wasn’t an amazing life, but it was comfortable. I had a job, an apartment, a hobby, and even the occasional girlfriend. Okay, the job was assistant manager at a pizza joint, the apartment was upstairs, and the hobby was an obscure martial arts school on the third floor, but the nearby college was chock-full of pretty girls, which meant the restaurant was, too.
It was slow when she walked in, that mid-afternoon lull when everyone’s finished lunch and gone back to work or class. She was pretty enough that I was surprised she was alone, but when I went over to take her order, I understood: she was nuts.
Usually it takes at least a few minutes to figure out that a college girl is completely bonkers, but then, they usually don’t open the conversation with, “tomorrow you will die, and then I shall assume control of your fate”.
“I’ll be right back with our vegan menu.”
