I’ve gone through phases in my modes of coffee preparation. Of course, my first experience was simply making drip coffee with a traditional coffee maker. My first upgrade was using a French press. After that I started buying whole beans and grinding them myself with a blade grinder. Using a French press and grinding your own beans are regarded as the most important first steps you can take to make your coffee taste better: using a French press means you have to heat the water yourself, and can get it closer to the optimal 200 degrees Fahrenheit, while grinding at home means less time for coffee beans to go stale.

The next coffee upgrade I wanted to make was to switch from a blade mill to a burr mill. The difference is that a blade mill cuts your coffee, while a burr mill crushes it. In addition, blade mills have a hard time grinding coffee beans evenly — you have to grind your beans down to a fine powder before you’ll get a consistent particle size. Blade mills can also make the ground coffee slightly more bitter, due to heat from the friction of the blades.

Unfortunately, blade mills are also way cheaper than burr mills. An electric blade mill might set you back $50, while the burr equivalent might be more in the $200 range. I wasn’t sure I wanted to pay that much for an electric burr mill, so I set my sights on a hand-operated (!) mill from a company named Hario, the “Skerton.” It was priced at a much more reasonable $40. Luckily for me, I got one for my birthday last month, so thought I’d share my experience of using a hand-operated coffee mill for the past two months.

It’s not as annoying as you might think to have to grind coffee by hand. I kind of enjoy using the mill while waiting for my kettle to boil… it adds to the preparation ritual. That being said, I only have to grind enough coffee for a two-cup French press. If I needed to brew a pot of drip coffee, I would definitely be using the electric mill.

The Skerton produces a pretty even grind… basically it’ll look like what you get buying pre-ground coffee. You can adjust the coarseness of the end result, but the mill doesn’t handle very coarse grinds very well; you’ll get some large chunks of coffee bean here and there.

The construction of the device is pretty good. The top of the mill consists of a plastic hopper with a metal crank and ceramic burr. You can adjust the coarseness of the grind by unscrewing the crank and adjusting a metal washer that controls the height of the burr. The top screws into a heavy glass container, used for catching the ground coffee. As a nice touch, Hario includes a rubber bottom for the glass jar, which makes it easier to use the mill: it sticks to flat surfaces, making it less likely to slide around.

All told, I’m happy with the Skerton so far. My electric mill has been put out of sight, and I’ve even gotten the wife to use the Skerton a few times. It’s helped me elevate my coffee snobbery to the next level.

Stupid OS X trick today. Know how you can view the connection status of your Bluetooth keyboard/mouse by clicking the icon in your menu bar? Well, normally those are named something boring. Here’s how you can assign clever names to your mouse and keyboard.

Open your System Preferences and click the Bluetooth icon. You should see a list of all connected devices. Select one and click the “settings” gear icon at the bottom of the list, then choose the Rename option. That’s it! Now you can easily identify which wireless accessories are connected to your computer.

In practice, what “open” means for Android is that each phone manufacturer will take the base OS, then try to customize it as much as possible for their devices, in an attempt to differentiate themselves from other Android handset manufacturers. As far as I know, it’s impossible to remove these customizations and revert back to Google’s “vanilla” Android UI without significant hacking. The annoying thing here is that I would want to use a phone with no tacked-on cruft, but HTC, Motorola, etc. don’t provide that option.

The other problem with Android phones is that you can’t get official OS updates without going through the carrier/manufacturer. With iOS, this isn’t a big deal; Apple releases a new version, and everyone can download and upgrade at the same time. With Android, Google releases a new version, and then the manufacturers have to tailor the upgrade to fit each of their devices. Of course, this takes time, and in some cases a manufacturer won’t want to keep supporting their device, which means you are crap out of luck.

Both of these problems don’t exist if you buy one of the “official” Android phones, the Nexus One or Nexus S. But bizarrely, the Nexus phones are only supported by T-Mobile in the US (you can run one on AT&T, sans 3G data connection). Of course, that means they don’t work on Verizon’s CMDA network at all. The unfortunate conclusion is that Google doesn’t feel like giving people using carriers other than T-Mobile a choice on whether or not to user their official phone.

These three problems have prevented me from using Android, and since it looks like Verizon is going to start carrying the iPhone very soon, I don’t think there’s much hope for Android in my future.

Gervais starts out by attempting to be humble. When people ask him why he doesn’t believe in God, he says, “I still give my logical answer because I feel that not being honest would be patronizing and impolite.” Unfortunately, his honest answer, as detailed in the rest of the essay, felt very patronizing to me. I’ve attempted here to form a counter-point: “A Holiday Message from Nathan Demick: Why I’m not an Atheist.”

Many people use the idea of empirical science as their reason for not believing in God. “In the ancient past,” they reason, “man had no idea how the world worked. They created this idea of a “god” to explain natural phenomena. We now know how the world works, and the supernatural has no place in it. We can’t test the existence of a deity, so therefore there is none.” Yes, it’s impossible to prove there is a God. But there are many pieces of evidence that, if we choose to consider them, point to his existence.

Consider the “lowly” cell: although it is the most basic component of biological life, it is ridiculously complex in its’ own right. Just one cell is a marvel of biological engineering… but science doesn’t have an answer for how cells originated. There are theories and conjectures, but no repeatable tests that can prove to us how life started. We can believe that life formed through naturalistic means. Or we can believe that the complexity of life was started by God. To be honest, both views seem a bit ridiculous at first glance. “Life was created by an all-powerful, invisible man.” Or, “Life formed spontaneously out of nothing.” But the first is less ridiculous, because of what I’ve learned through science.

If, while on a walk, you come across an arrangement of rocks (let’s use Stonehenge as an example), you might consider how the stones came to be in that formation. Well, even primitive structures like Stonehenge are obviously the result of someone’s will. How can we consider the intricacies of life to be the result of some ex nihilo naturalistic phenomenon? It’s like finding an iPad on the ground and saying, “Hey, that’s a pretty cool rock!” Science tells us that nature does not produce order from disorder, or life from nothing.

In Romans 1:20, Paul writes, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” Nature itself (and science, which is the observation of nature) is evidence for God.

Just as we must choose between atheism and theism, a theist must choose what deity to believe in. That choice is made by examining the philosophy that a religion espouses, and deciding whether the physical evidence and our observations about life fit in with that philosophy. Studying religious texts is the easiest way to do this in many cases. In the case of Christianity, this would mean determining whether the Bible (a combination of Jewish and Christian religious writings) is a valid source of knowledge.

One way of determining its’ validity is to look at its’ contents. For example, the Bible claims to have been written by God through the inspiration of human authors. Part of their writings include predictions of the future. If these predictions were verified to be false, we could immediately determine the text to be unreliable. However, the oldest copies of Biblical texts have been dated to long before the events they predict (for example, when Jesus was supposed to appear — Google “Daniel 9″). Is this proof that God exists? No, but it’s another chunk of evidence that you should consider before making your decision.

Some people today reject “Christian morals.” They feel that such rules infringe on human rights — to live in whatever way seems best to them. “That’s the way I am; I can choose for myself,” they might say. Well, consider the psychotic serial murderer. Why can’t he live his life in the way that comes most naturally for him? “It’s not right,” you might say. But who are you to say what is right for others? Does society determine what’s right? In 1940′s-era Germany, “right” was genocide against “ethnically inferior” people. Without an absolute source of truth, the morality of our actions is completely relative.

The Bible claims that humans were created to live in a certain way. Humans were created perfect, but made the choice to decide good and bad for themselves. When our ancestors did this, they introduced evil into the world — man’s will instead of God’s will. This is evident when we consider what’s observable about people: we have capacity for greatness, but also depravity. In this case, the Bible perfectly describes the human condition, which is another piece of evidence that I consider in my choice.

These are some of the things I think about when others question my belief. I’m sure that this was a bit more rambling and disjointed than I’d hoped, but let me know in the comments if you’d like clarification. Just as I use the critiques of others as an opportunity for reflection, I hope you will too. In the end, your decision is your decision; just make sure that you’ve considered the evidence first.

To start things off, I announce myself to the receptionist, and then have to wait for 20 minutes. Started to get real frustrated. I almost just got up and left, but the receptionist told me that “they were coming,” plus I didn’t want to feel like I had totally wasted my time driving out there.

After I finally meet with the guy, instead of giving me an overview of his company and telling me why I would want to work there, he tries to conduct some sort of interview, asking bizarre psuedo-technical questions. He talks almost constantly, giving me no chance to ask my own questions. At this point I had been in their offices for about an hour, and was frustrated and ready to leave. On my way out the guy mentions that he’ll look into setting up some contract work for me, but I got the feeling that he was as unimpressed with me as I was with him. I haven’t heard back, and even if I do, I think I’ll have to decline.

So, great waste of time for everyone involved. I guess I learned that I should first exchange emails or talk on the phone with a “real person” (not a headhunter) before taking time out of my life to go to what may be a waste-of-time meeting.

Here’s the breakdown:
Apple Store (refurb): $1019 + $68.78 (6.75% sales tax) = $1087.78
Amazon (new): $1149.99
Difference: $62.21

The difference is that Apple will charge you sales tax, while Amazon doesn’t. After factoring that in, the discount you get for refurb hardware just isn’t compelling. I’d rather pay an extra $62.21 for a brand new machine, where I know that the screen (and especially the battery) have come directly from the factory, unused.

My advice is to make a mental note of this next time you’re in the market for some Apple kit.

So right now I’m finding out that I was not really prepared in regard to artistic output. Most of that was my fault, to be honest. In my early life, I never really had a reason to want to draw. I was much more interested in playing games (of course). However, now that I have an interest in actually creating games, I want to do everything myself, including the art. It will definitely be bad, but I want to be able to execute my own vision myself. Kind of selfish, but since I’m not doing it for money, there’s no reason not to. Plus, I like the idea of making my brain more “well-rounded,” and also not being embarrassed when I have to draw stick figures :/

As an introductory exercise, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has you complete three pencil drawings: a self-portrait, another person from memory, and your own hand. Chandra and I sat down last night in front of a mirror and completed all three in one go. Her self-portrait was way better than mine, which I entitled, “Fat-faced, angry man.” It can only get better from here.

Enter Cygwin, a Linux-like interface for Windows. It has the bash shell, as well as lots of popular tools, such as C/C++ compilers. This is pretty much just what we want, eh?

Let’s download and set up Cygwin. Hit up the website and click the “get Cygwin” link on the right. Run the installer, and make sure to have the ‘developer tools’ option checked during setup. When you’re done with that, this readme has all the information you need regarding installing the SDL library. OpenGL libraries will be installed with Cygwin by default.

That’s it! You’re ready to rock. Just compile your SDL/OpenGL program using a command similar to this:

gcc -o test.exe main.c `sdl-config --cflags --libs` -lglu32 -lopengl32

If you’re using SDL, make sure to have a copy of SDL.dll in the directory your program is in.

Run #1
Run #2

Of course, I was locked out of my house when I got back from the second. Jerks. I was getting so dehydrated and hungry, all I could think about was what I was going to eat when I got back. I ended up buying a box of Golden Grahams, and destroying half of it. I fell asleep in my clothes, woke up at 4:00AM, ate another bowl, and went back to sleep.

I finally got my new bicycle, too. The frame is a 56 cm Surly Steamroller, which I am really liking so far. I didn’t ride it to work today due to overexertion yesterday, but it handles nice. It has a front brake this time…

My roommates and I are getting possession of our new house on Friday, but I’m not sure how much stuff I’ll be able to move due to the annual Xenos College Ministry Holden Beach Trip Extravaganza. No one else in my homechurch is going, ‘cos, like, they’re too old, or something. Actually, that’s not quite true… the only “real” (i.e. non-married) girl in my group is going, too. I bought two books that I’m saving for next week: Spook Country by William Gibson, and After Dark by Haruki Murakami. Awesome! I think I’m going to bring my Game Boy and get some oldschool handheld action in as well.