Karl Heinz Kremer’s Ramblings

People who know me know how important good coffee is to me. For the last two years I’ve been using a Rancilio Sylvia to brew my morning cappuccino. And that is exactly what I wanted to do last Sunday morning:

So, I grind, tamp, and install the filter. I push the button, and within a split second, I see light brown water shooting out of the filter…

That’s not what’s supposed to happen. Maybe I did not tamp enough… So, I try again - with the same result. Maybe the setting on my grinder got changed, adjust, grind, tamp, and give it another try - with the same result.

I notice that I can turn the handle of the filter a lot farther than usually… Did something break in the group head?

ARRRRGGGGHHHH… I need my morning coffee! My despair is good news for the local coffee shop.

After breakfast, I try to get on Rancilio’s web site to see if they have any troubleshooting instructions. The web site is down. The Italian web site is down too. Is this a conspiracy to drive me nuts?

OK, I have not cleaned the machine in a while, let’s start with that. Sure enough, the machine needed a good cleaning. I put everything together again, try another shot - the same result.

While disposing of the grounds, I notice something: The grounds are cold. They should be hot, but given the speed with which the water rushed through, at least a bit warm. Cold. Hmmm… I realize that not just the grounds are cold, the filter is cold too… and the group head too, and the whole machine is cold. Even though the “heating” lamp is on, the machine is not heating.

Aha! That explains everything. How could I miss that important clue?

So, let’s try Google. And sure enough, I find information about how to reset the thermal protection “thingy”. I open the machine, look around, and there it is: A small red button. I push it and hear a “click”.

I suppose that means that the thing actually got triggered. After putting the cup warming tray back on I turn the machine on, and after a couple of minutes I can feel how it is getting warm. Bingo!

Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I do not wait the 30 minutes the machine usually needs to warm up, I do part of the “Cheating Ms. Sylvia” process and pull a shot after 15 minutes: It’s delicious!

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A Spam email without the message body? How am I supposed to buy stuff from them - or claim the price I won?

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Somebody stacked rocks at the Chimney Bluffs beach. I’ve used my new Canon 70-200 f/2.8 lens wide open. With F2.8 the depth of field is very shallow, and I guess I have to get used to that…

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Do you live (or work) in the NYC area, and are interesting in beta testing a “portable internet device”? Centercode is looking for beta testers at https://www.onlinebeta.com/callout/default.html?callid={28E7069E-D185-43EE-BC5A-536E11BBA143}

I would love to sign up, but unfortunately Rochester is not really considered to be a NYC suburb.

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Rochester’s paper, the Democrat and Chronicle, is going to publish a coffee table book with the best photos of Rochester. Anybody can submit pictures on the web site of the project. I never miss an opportunity to shamelessly promote myself so there are a bunch of my Rochester pictures on the site as well.

The photos that get the most votes will get published in the book, so please go and vote for me

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I am using Google Apps For Your Domain (GAFYD) for - among other things - my email. Google’s SPAM filter is pretty good, but I used to go through the messages in my SPAM folder occasionally, and every now and then I would pull out a message that was incorrectly identified as SPAM… I don’t do that anymore. So, if you sent me something and have not received a reply, chances are that your message got lost in SPAM.

Why do I no longer look for ham in spam? Because it got too overwhelming. Google keeps a month worth of messages in the SPAM folder, anything older than a month gets deleted automatically. Up until yesterday I had 14000 SPAM messages. Today the count dropped to a bit over 8000. This means that about a month ago I received 6000 SPAM emails in about a day - oh man was I looking back to the good old days of only 300 SPAMs a day. The reason for that was that somebody used my my email address and my domain as the “From” address for a ton of SPAM, and a lot of mail servers out there still send out messages that are trying to tell the sender “your message got classified as spam” or “the user you tried to spam does unfortunately no longer exit”… And all these messages ended up in my mailbox.

This was not the first time that happened, and I’m just too tired of going through these messages and trying to find the needle in the spam stack.

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Here is my first attempt to bake on of the breads in Daniel Leader’s
Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole-Grain Recipes from Europe’s Best Artisan Bakers. As usual, I had a problem with following instructions, and I had to modify the recipe a bit: Instead of 500g of all purpose flour, I used 400g of AP and 100g of whole wheat graham flour. I did not want to replace too much flour with whole wheat to not change the character of the bread and the consistency of the dough too much.

And, because of time constraints, I had to “rush” the whole process a bit by shaving off a few minutes of every step. The temperature on that day (it was very hot) may have worked to my advantage because the dough did rise a lot faster.

French bread is best fresh, and I did not want to eat three loafs within an hour of baking them, so I also cut short the baking time a bit - hence the somehow pale look of the finished bread.

That allows me to freeze the loafs and then just pop them into my convection toaster oven for 8 to 10 minutes and have delicious fresh french bread.

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How Did You Get Here?

I did some research on why and how visitors come to my site. One interesting finding is that a number of people are searching for information about PDF content streams. Here is the list of the 50 most common Google searches that contain the string “content”:

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