Padding the bottom line (day 152)

bacterial update:  not too much to report.  I finally have Pu-erh tea in my hands.  I tried to purchase some from the Granville Island Tea Company but they were out and counseled me to get it from Chinatown regardless.  Apparently it's a specialty product that you don't want to just approach haphazardly.  Steve went to fetch some for me in Chinatown this afternoon.  The problem with Chinatown is that it's hard to know whether you're getting what you came for because of language and culture barriers.   It's always an adventure and I bet if you did it every week you could build up the right relationships.   What we acquired is a 4 year old raw pu-erh which I'm guessing is like buying a $20 bottle of wine.   It came beautifully packaged as if it was going to be a gift which I suppose is the reason most people like us go into the shop.  I did feel special holding the box and unwrapping the 'melon'.  I brewed a cup and it tastes fine though I was expecting a stronger taste and a darker brew.  It was pretty tough to flake off the tea leaves so perhaps I didn't use enough.   It tastes like an earthy green tea.  It's an odd feeling to not know whether you're drinking the real thing or not.  Like entering a foreign land and hoping you're not mistaking their version of McDonald's for fine dining.  I have a new goal to get myself to a tea shop that will serve genuine samples of Pu-erh tea.  For now I'll use what I have and hope that it'll be drinkable kombucha.  It's been said that a good Pu-erh can create the champagne of kombucha.
The Kefir grains are still dormant while I work my way through all the Kefir.  I give it another two days.

I made a deal with Steve that I would get to bed before midnight today so I'm running out of time to write much more.  But how about that iPad?  It certainly is the talk of the town.  I saw a funny article in the Onion where they portrayed Steve Jobs madly scrambling at the last minute to put together a tablet, finally deciding to just slap a bunch of iPhones together.  I suppose why not keep going with a good thing.   We were all expecting innovation in hardware but we may have received innovation in software and interaction.  I'll have to try it and see.   It's interesting that they didn't use e-ink technology.  They may not have been aiming for the e-book market and in their promotional video they repeat 'web browsing' an awful lot.

A song for this post.

Rant + Celestial Beauty (day 72)

I bought myself an Apple Airport Express.  I connected it, went through a short setup process and was able to play songs from iTunes on my speakers in the living room, remotely.   I was happy.  But the next step was not so easy.  In fact, it seems to be impossible.   All my music is hosted on a NAS which permits all my computers to store it once and share it with all the machines on my network.  So far so good.   iTunes on my machines can connect to the shared library on the NAS.  But if I try to use the Remote app on the iphone to see the shared library, I can't do it.  I can't pair with the library on the NAS because there is no way for me to enter the pairing code on the server (there seem to be some hacks out there that might work, but it certainly is not easy or sanctioned).  Even if I connect with the itunes client running on one of my machines, it doesn't see the shared library.  It looks like my library is empty.   So I'm stuck.  Apple does not provide a proper iTunes client on the iPhone, and does not allow the browsing of share libraries on the Remote App, and does not allow pairing with servers without a GUI.   This is a sad state of affairs.  The only other solution I've found is to buy an expensive media player that would be paired with PlugPlayer which can see my NAS (but not the Airport Express).  There is an application called Air UPnP which will make the Airport Express look like a proper device to applications like PlugPlayer but it needs to run on a PC which defeats one of the purpose of having the NAS in the first place -- not to have any other machines on besides the NAS.  My real beef is with Apple for not providing support for externally hosted libraries with the Apple Remote app.   It would make the Airport Express so much more useful.

I may still find a hack around this mess, but for now the frustration of being so close is driving me mad.

I will redeem this post with a picture of a beautiful animation I saw the IDMAa09 conference exhibition : Celestial Clock by Anson Call.  I can't find any information online about it unfortunately.  No video, no pictures.  What I'm posting here is a snapshot from my iPhone.

A song for this post.

Macbook on world trip (day 42)

This is the trajectory for my new macbook pro.  It started in China which was surprising in itself and then instead of heading south from Anchorage to its eventual destination, it crossed the country to New York and Ontario.  Is this a mistake, or a baffling side effect of centralization?

A song for this post.