I’ve been collecting coffee/water ratios and experimenting on my own and I’ve decided that fifteen parts of water to one part of coffee is just about right for me, using a plain pour over method. Coffee recipes — that is, the proportion of coffee to water — are best expressed in weight not volume.
How good is US soccer?
In FIFA rankings, the US mens team is ranked 22nd as of April 2011, right between the Ivory Coast and Paraguay and the same rank we finished with in 1993. In the ensuing years, we’ve averaged around 18th place. We got as high as fourth place in April of 2006 but finished that year at an abysmal 31st.
VOIP calling rates by country
I’m moving a landline to VOIP and my service provider has a handy table comparing VOIP international calling rates from different vendors.
iIncomprehensible
I can’t figure out iTunes. It’s supposed to be the center of Apple’s digital media universe, but I find it impossible to use. I’d rather not use it at all, but I have an iPhone which I love and my wife has an iPad which my kids love and both require me to hook up to iTunes for some reason. We don’t have any music at all on either device, but we still have to use iTunes. Also, there’s an app on my iPhone which is called iTunes but it refers to the music store; I just figured this out. There’s a separate app, called iPod, for playing music. Incomprehensible. Continue reading
and so it was, and is, and shall be
12 August 1987, NYC
Driving through Brooklyn recently I slightly freaked out, to great benefit. Since most of my prior experiences of the borough were through nostalgic movies and books and other remiscences of adult Brooklyn kids (Niel Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs, Woody Allen’s Radio Days) I know the Brooklyn of the 1930s, Mr. Frommer’s Brooklyn, better than the Brooklyn of today. It is very easy to imagine that past onthe reality of the present — Brooklyn doesn’t look like Manhattan. But what I did, I took this one step farther and imagined that the reality is the past as if I am an observer from the future, Woody Allen’s next generation. It was cool, especially since it gave me a good idea of what old people mean when they describe things — oh, cars in those days were so different, with rubber wheels and gas motors. For instance (not in Brooklyn) I know that the meat market where the office is will be replaced by expensive housing in the future, and I will say to my kids [true: December, 2010], “I remember when this was a market, bustling with trucks and people, deliveries and blood and cars parked on the sidewalk and butchers and meat all over the place.” Hopefully I’ll be as poetic in my New Old Age.
The thought that I am going to be in Asia a couple of weeks, flying over E. Europe and Turkey and the Middle East and the Indian Ocean, takes my breath away. And, I keep reminding myself, only nineteen!