The northlondonhippy

Archive for February, 2009

I took deliv­ery today of my brand new Robo-Toaster — the Toaster of the Future!

Not only did I receive it today, I made this rockin’ video:

I shot it using my Kodak Zi6 HD Pocket Cam­corder in about 10 min­utes and edited it in a cou­ple of hours using iMovie ’09. I’m not expe­ri­enced at all with that ver­sion of iMovie, so it took a bit longer than it should have done. Plus I found it eas­ier to ren­der it out in Quick­time, rather than play­ing it back in the appli­ca­tion, which stut­tered and stalled a bit on my 2.8mhz dual core iMac as I added lay­ers of effects and titles.

Clearly I have too much free time on my hands. And if you just spent 2 min­utes watch­ing my video, clearly you do too.

Hav­ing a lot of free time recently has meant I’ve been able to immerse myself in the Twit­ter­verse. Its an odd place to vir­tu­ally hang out and it reminds me of so many things.

I’ve already com­pared it to try­ing to shout the loud­est in a room full of shouty peo­ple. Com­pet­ing for atten­tion seems to be impos­si­ble, unless you already com­mand atten­tion from peo­ple in the real world.

Celebri­ties seem to thrive the most in the Twit­ter­verse. As they are already cel­e­brated, peo­ple are ready to engage with them and hang on their every word.

Many peo­ple seems to spend an inor­di­nate amount of time try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate with celebri­ties, to be noticed by them, receive a reply from them, or bet­ter an endorse­ment of what­ever it is they do on the inter­net. There’s a sort of spe­cial per­sonal val­i­da­tion that can only come from mak­ing some sort of con­tact with a celebrity.

Its not a one-way street, as the celebri­ties also ben­e­fit from the atten­tion they receive. The more fol­low­ers on Twit­ter you have, the more pop­u­lar and wor­thy a celebrity you are and I would expect this sort of thing will be used in future con­tract nego­ti­a­tions for some of them. I can hear their agents now, say­ing with absolute author­ity, that celebrity X has 100,000 plus fol­low­ers on Twit­ter which means there’s an instant, loyal audi­ence for any­thing they do.

Maybe that’s true. But maybe not.

Just because I fol­low a celebrity on Twit­ter, does not mean I will see their film, watch their TV show, buy their album or even visit their blog. The ease with which you can fol­low some­one means you may only have a pass­ing inter­est in what they really do, but you are curi­ous about how they use Twitter.

Some celebri­ties seem to use Twit­ter as a way to feed their own ego and nar­cis­sism. There’s noth­ing wrong with that and to be hon­est, I wouldn’t mind scor­ing myself a lit­tle piece of that kind of Twit­ter action too. It seems seduc­tive and addic­tive, to have a con­stant flow of pos­i­tive affir­ma­tion from strangers who admire you for one rea­son or another.

But Twit­ter doesn’t work like that, if my brief and ever-evolving list of fol­low­ers is any­thing to go by. As a vir­tual Twit­ter nobody, peo­ple choose to fol­low me on the basis of ran­domly encoun­ter­ing one of my tweets, or fish­ing for key words con­tained within them.

I’ve been tweet­ing a bit about my cof­fee con­sump­tion. Its innocu­ous enough, true to my life and its how I start most days, with a freshly made cap­puc­cino. Prob­a­bly 20% of my fol­low­ers have picked up on my cof­fee ref­er­ences and that’s why they are there.

I’ve also made a few ref­er­ences to being a jour­nal­ist in real life, so I have a hand­ful of fol­low­ers inter­ested in the field of news. I don’t tweet much about that part of my life, so they will end up disappointed.

I also tweet about drugs, specif­i­cally my weed intake. I some­times use bad lan­guage and one day I may even make some cock jokes. I know that when I do, I will lose followers.

The more focussed your tweets are on a par­tic­u­lar sub­ject, the more loyal your fol­low­ers will be. Per­haps I should split myself into sev­eral vir­tual peo­ple on Twit­ter; the cof­fee­hippy, to tweet about my java intake, the weed­hippy, to tweet about smok­ing spliffs and lastly, the cock­hippy who only makes dick jokes.

I’m just going to keep tweet­ing what­ever I feel like tweet­ing and if I offend some peo­ple, I’ll prob­a­bly end up enthralling oth­ers. Who knows? My net num­ber of fol­low­ers seems to be slightly ever increas­ing and I’m not really pay­ing that much atten­tion to the peo­ple who leave.

I did promise to tweet my credit card num­bers if I ever reach 1000 fol­low­ers, which is quite an incen­tive to fol­low me and put up with my bullshit.

And by bull­shit, of course I mean high-quality, infor­ma­tive and enter­tain­ing bull­shit of 140 char­ac­ters in length.

Six months ago I was diag­nosed with Hashimoto’s Dis­ease, oth­er­wise known as Chronic Thy­roidi­tis. At the time I didn’t really grasp the sig­nif­i­cance or seri­ous­ness of my diagnosis.

I do now.

I’ve prob­a­bly had this stu­pid dis­ease for a while, longer than I’ve known. I had symp­toms that I didn’t know were symp­toms for at least a year prior to being told of the cause.

I just thought I was get­ting old.

I am get­ting old, but age was not caus­ing my prob­lems, my use­less thy­roid was…and is.

I’m still not well. I find myself say­ing that a lot lately, in response to peo­ple ask­ing me why I look tired, or pale.

I’ve been under­go­ing treat­ment for Hashimoto’s since my diag­no­sis. Treat­ment comes in the form of a small pill taken daily to replace the thy­roid hor­mone my body no longer manufactures.

The side effects caused by the pills are very sim­i­lar to the symp­toms of the dis­ease. I get heart pal­pi­ta­tions, breath­less­ness, headaches, dizzi­ness, light-headedness and these get worse every time the dosage is raised.

The dosage gets raised every cou­ple of months as I am still not on a ther­a­peu­ti­cally effec­tive level yet. I started out on 25mg, then went to 50mg and now I am on 100mg of Levothy­rox­ine. Its about to be raised again, prob­a­bly to 150mg, though I am await­ing for the results of a blood test for confirmation.

Lately, extreme exhaus­tion and lethargy have been added to the mix. I con­stantly crave sleep, but I don’t sleep deeply or for very long. I get phys­i­cally tired very eas­ily and don’t have any of my usual stamina.

My nor­mal walk to my local high­street used to take me well under 10 min­utes, it now takes me closer to 15 and the return jour­ney is stretch­ing to the 20 minute mark.

I’m hav­ing con­cen­tra­tion prob­lems too. “Brain fog” is another symp­tom and there’s a real pea-souper in my head most of the time. I find it dif­fi­cult pay­ing atten­tion to peo­ple when they tell me any­thing com­plex, my mind wan­ders and I am eas­ily dis­tracted. The same is true of my read­ing com­pre­hen­sion, if a para­graph drags on too long, as this one seems to be doing, I for­get what it says.

I get waves of nau­sea, my appetite vac­il­lates between hav­ing none at all, to sud­denly being rav­en­ous and I’ve been hav­ing mood swings too.

All of this sucks the big one in a very real, demon­stra­ble way and I am tired of it.

To com­pli­cate mat­ters, I haven’t been hav­ing much fun with the NHS.

My GP referred me to a spe­cial­ist and after wait­ing months for an appoint­ment, I ended up leav­ing the clinic with­out see­ing the con­sul­tant endocri­nol­o­gist. The clinic was over­sub­scribed, there weren’t any seats in the wait­ing room, the nurses were surly and rude and after wait­ing way too long, I left.

I did receive a let­ter of apol­ogy from the con­sul­tant for my poor treat­ment, but that is a small con­so­la­tion. The entire expe­ri­ence left me with a bad taste in my mouth and no desire to ever return to that clinic.

It gets even worse, my reg­u­lar GP, who I have been see­ing for nearly a dozen years has been hav­ing health prob­lems of his own. He’s cut back his hours and for the last sev­eral weeks, I’ve been unable to see him. I finally gave up and saw the surgery’s senior partner.

The senior part­ner imme­di­ately said she would take over man­ag­ing my care, which makes me think my reg­u­lar doc­tor won’t be back full time any time soon.

Being sick seems to be hard work and I worry if I ever had some­thing seri­ously big wrong with me that I wouldn’t have the patience to fight my way through the sys­tem to get the treat­ment I would need to survive.

And speak­ing of sur­vival, peo­ple can and do die from Hashimoto’s Dis­ease. One of the things it does to you is weaken your heart and one can suf­fer from heart fail­ure. I’m not say­ing that’s what I am head­ing for, but quite often it does feel that way to me.

I’m told that once I am on an effec­tive dose of med­ica­tion, I’ll feel like a brand new per­son. I’ve heard that a lot for the last six months. I’d be happy if I could just feel like the old per­son I used to be, before I was diag­nosed and on this stu­pid medication.

The exhaus­tion caught up to me this week and pre­vented me from get­ting to work. I’ve been liv­ing on adren­a­lin and my sup­ply must have finally depleted, I sort of col­lapsed the other night. I’m now signed off work for a week to rest.

I feel like this is my life now and I’ll never feel like my old self again. I know I’m an impa­tient patient, but I just can’t see a path back to good health. Let’s hope my doctor’s vision is clearer than my own.

Hello. Wel­come back. Did ya miss me?

Its ram­ble time. Woke up too early fol­low­ing too lit­tle sleep. Must focus.

On what?

Its a pleas­ant, relax­ing day off, or rather it should be, but I’ve got heaps to do ‘round the house and I might even wan­der up to my local high street.

Do they call it a “high street” because you have to get high before you go there? No? Well, tough, because I will be high when I go.

It should be a rule that you have to be high before allowed onto your local high street. It would make the entire shop­ping expe­ri­ence more pleas­ant for every­one involved. The shop assis­tants would think all the cus­tomers were mel­low and pleas­ant, the shop assis­tants would be help­ful with­out being over­bear­ing and I wouldn’t nearly get into fist fights with all the rude, surly peo­ple knock­ing into me and block­ing my way.

Oh wouldn’t it be grand?

As soon as they start open­ing cannabis cafes around the coun­try, this is the sort of relaxed Utopia we can expect. Until then it will con­tinue to be no fun.

Did you see a group of for­mer pres­i­dents from Latin Amer­ica are urg­ing the world to adopt a con­trolled and reg­u­lated cannabis mar­ket? Did you look here?

Even the UN is work­ing towards this fairly obvi­ous and sen­si­ble con­clu­sion. In the good ol’ US of A, they are mov­ing in this direc­tion. Pres­i­dent Sav­iour Obama has even said that fed­eral raids against med­ical mar­i­juana estab­lish­ments must end and the fed­eral gov­ern­ment needs to start respect­ing laws passed by indi­vid­ual states.

Many states in Amer­ica have already decrim­i­nalised weed. That means it is con­sid­ered the low­est pos­si­ble polic­ing pri­or­ity, with penal­ties for pos­ses­sion being the equiv­a­lent of a minor traf­fic or park­ing offence.

Why can’t we do that here?

We could and we were going to until Gor­don Brown and Jacqui Smith started muck­ing around with things. These two nin­com­poops believe laws should be used to “send a mes­sage” to peo­ple, rather than reflect the sci­en­tific evi­dence or the truth.

This week the Advi­sory Coun­cil for the Mis­use of Drugs (ACMD). the body that advises the gov­ern­ment on drug pol­icy stated that ecstasy (E, pills, MDMA), be re-classified from its cur­rent A grade, back into Class B, to reflect its rel­a­tive harm to the user. Sounds sen­si­ble enough as E is not in the same league as coke and smack.

The head of the ACMD, Pro­fes­sor. David Nutt went on to say that tak­ing ecstasy is no worse than horse­back rid­ing and an equiv­a­lent num­ber of peo­ple die from both activ­i­ties annu­ally. You would have thought that he said Jesus was secretly Satan for the drub­bing he took over the com­ments. He was even forced to apol­o­gise and his future on the ACMD has been questioned.

Just for telling the truth!

In Amer­ica, MDMA has been used by men­tal health pro­fes­sion­als to assist in the ther­apy process. Would med­ical doc­tors pre­scribe some­thing poten­tially lethal when their first rule is to “do no harm”? What do they know that we don’t know.

Noth­ing! The dif­fer­ence is our gov­ern­ment uses leg­is­la­tion to “send a mes­sage” rather than to treat peo­ple with respect. Leg­is­lat­ing moral­ity never works, because peo­ple have their own moral com­passes and that counts for something.

The sim­ple fact is that any­one who’s ever smoked a joint or necked an E knows that what the gov­ern­ment is say­ing is bull­shit. What do you reckon that does to the government’s credibility?

It knocks it into the toi­let. When a gov­ern­ment lies about any­thing, we all suffer.

Drug tak­ing is a health issue, not a moral or legal issue and try­ing to force it only does a dis­ser­vice to every­one. If I choose to ingest MDMA, or cannabis or choco­late or even bro­ken glass, its my body and my choice.

Crim­i­nal­is­ing mil­lions of peo­ple serves no one. If you’re hav­ing trou­ble with drugs, you should be able to seek help with­out wor­ry­ing about end­ing up with a crim­i­nal record. And if you are enjoy­ing them respon­si­bly, it should be nobody’s busi­ness but your own.

Com­mon sense and com­pas­sion will even­tu­ally rule the day, but for now we’ll have to just keep watch­ing our lead­ers screw things up more and more. Its frus­trat­ing, annoy­ing and unavoid­able, for as long as politi­cians can use the debate over drugs to score points with Mid­dle Eng­land, the sense­less per­se­cu­tion of peo­ple who enjoy some­thing other than booze will continue.

Gee, that wasn’t as nearly as ram­bling as I expected it to be. Lucky you, or maybe even lucky me.

A year ago, I spent far too much money on my cof­fee mak­ing set-up. I say that, sit­ting here a year later, sip­ping the finest cap­puc­cino I’ve ever had.

Since yes­ter­day.

Every day I drink the best cof­fee I’ve ever tasted and I have absolutely no regrets on how much money I spent.

I have an Izzo Vivi espresso maker and a Macap M4D grinder as well as var­i­ous acces­sories that help me pur­sue the per­fect coffee.

The Izzo Vivi is on the low-end of the pro-sumer cof­fee maker scale, but is an excel­lent piece of kit. Its been reli­able, depend­able and rel­a­tively easy to use and main­tain. Most impor­tantly, it cranks out shot after shot of deli­cious espresso and has plenty of steam power to turn your milk into light and pour-able mirco-foam.

The espresso maker, as I quickly learned, is not the most impor­tant machine com­po­nent in cof­fee mak­ing, its the grinder. To really make good espresso, you need a grinder that is up to the task and what­ever you think you should spend on one, its prob­a­bly not enough. Any cof­fee web­site or forum will tell you exactly the same thing.

My espresso maker has no real con­trols on it, except for the lever that oper­ates the pump. You fill the portafil­ter with freshly ground cof­fee, lock it into place and then lift the lever to the pump. When you’re done, flip the lever down and the pump stops. That’s really it.

All of your con­trol comes from adjust­ing the fine­ness of the grind and once you find your espresso range, requires min­i­mal tweak­ing depend­ing on the type and fresh­ness of your cof­fee beans.

Which leads me to what I think is the sin­gle most impor­tant com­po­nent in cof­fee mak­ing: freshly roasted beans.

I’ve read of some­thing called the “rule of twelve’s” when it comes to cof­fee which goes like this:

unroasted, green cof­fee beans stay fresh for 12 months
roasted cof­fee beans stay fresh for around 12 days
ground cof­fee stays fresh for 12 minutes

I buy my cof­fee online, about every fort­night, to insure I have the fresh­est, tasti­est beans pos­si­ble. I grind my beans directly in the portafil­ter, only sec­onds before I brew my espresso. You can’t get any fresher than that.

Cof­fee oxi­dises quickly and releases gasses which break it down and the flavour suf­fers for this. If you’re buy­ing your cof­fee pre-ground, or you are buy­ing roasted beans with­out know­ing the roast­ing date, you are cheat­ing your­self out of the best cof­fee you can drink.

And if you are using those pre-filled cof­fee pods, you are trad­ing con­ve­nience for taste.

You don’t have to spend as much as I have, but you really owe it to your­self to grind your own cof­fee and there are plenty of more afford­able options for grinders than mine.

And freshly roasted beans aren’t that expen­sive, a quar­ter kilo of a decent sin­gle estate or blend costs about the same as a tall cap­puc­cino from one of the high street chains and you’ll get at least 8 dou­ble espres­sos from it.

And it doesn’t have to be espresso, a decent Bodum press-pot with freshly ground cof­fee will make an out­stand­ing cup and if you are only grind­ing for fil­ter cof­fee, you can find some real bar­gains on grinders. I promise you, you will taste the difference.

My grinder is used every day, but the same can’t be said for the espresso maker. When I don’t have the time to heat it up, or clean it down after use, instead I use an Aeropress.

The main fea­ture of the Aero­press is that it will work with the same fine­ness of grind as the espresso maker, so no need to read­just the grinder. The Aero­press is made of plas­tic, very sim­ple to use and clean and pro­duces a very con­vinc­ing espresso-like cof­fee. I heat up some milk in the microwave and use one of those battery-operated hand whisks to froth it and in less than 5 min­utes, have some­thing which approx­i­mates a cappuccino.

But when I have the time, I always make the extra effort to use the Vivi. It takes longer and requires more clean-up, but its worth it.

My daily cof­fee rou­tine is some­thing like this:

Switch on the Vivi
Wait 30–45 min­utes for it to warm up
When ready, brew a dou­ble espresso
do a 2 sec­ond flush to clear loose grounds from the shower screen
back­flush for 10–15 sec­onds to clear oils from the brew path
froth my milk
flush the steam wand to get any milk residue out
build my drink
enjoy

Most days, I have a sec­ond cup as well, after that, I switch the machine off to let it cool. Then I clean out the drip tray, wipe it down and every other day, I refill the water reservoir.

I also back­flush with deter­gent occa­sion­ally, I soak the bas­kets and portafil­ters in the same deter­gent, I soak the tip of the steam wand in milk deposit remover and every few months I descale the boiler. None of this is dif­fi­cult or time consuming.

My acces­sory col­lec­tion includes 2x lined shot glasses to check I am get­ting the cor­rect vol­ume of espresso in the cor­rect amount of time (2 ounces in around 30 sec­onds), a cou­ple of shot pots, a stain­less steam jug for milk froth­ing, a 58mm Reg Bar­ber tam­per, a portafil­ter holder for tamp­ing, and a shot timer. The tamp­ing stand and the shot timer are use­ful, but not essen­tial, every­thing else I couldn’t do without.

I also have 4 portafil­ters; one with 2 spouts and a dou­ble bas­ket, another with one spout and a dou­ble bas­ket, a third with a blank­ing disk for back­flush­ing and a fourth that’s bot­tom­less with a triple bas­ket. The bot­tom­less portafil­ter was use­ful when I was learn­ing how to pack a portafil­ter prop­erly, as it showed me where to look for my mistakes.

I spent a good part of the year sam­pling dif­fer­ent beans and blends, but for many months now, I’ve been stick­ing one par­tic­u­lar bean, called Yemen Mokha Matrar which is the rich­est, tasti­est of all I tried. It works par­tic­u­larly well in milk-based drinks, like my amaz­ing cappuccinos.

You can get Yemen Mokha Matrar from a vari­ety of sup­pli­ers, though the roaster I use, roasts to order. I place an order on his web­site and he roasts the beans for me and ships them out the same day. Its a great ser­vice and they arrive the fol­low­ing day.

If any­one wants the name of the roaster I use, please feel free to email me. I’d like to include a link to his site, but would you want to be known as my offi­cial cof­fee roaster? I’m not cer­tain he would either.

Since I started mak­ing my own proper cof­fee at home, I haven’t had a cof­fee any place else that even comes close, not from the high street chains, not from the cof­fee ven­dor in my office, nowhere!

Life is far too short to be drink­ing sludge and you owe it to your­self to pro­vide your­self with the finest cof­fee pos­si­ble. Put it this way, if I had to pay high street prices for every cap­puc­cino I’ve had at home in the last year, I could have bought three sets of cof­fee mak­ing gear.

And if you are won­der­ing why an old trippy hippy like me digs cof­fee so much, its sim­ple. Cof­fee is a drug, like any­thing else that has an effect on your mood and per­cep­tion. Don’t believe me, read this and learn if you drink too much, you can have proper hallucinations.

I’ve spent the last week hang­ing out on Twit­ter, tweet­ing my lit­tle heart out. If you’re fol­low­ing me, you now know far too much about my empty shell of an existence.

You’re not fol­low­ing me, hardly any­one is. I don’t know what I expected, per­haps some pied-piper-like effect on peo­ple which had me rivalling the top ech­e­lon of Twit­ter­teers after my first tweet. As fuck­ing if!

Twit­ter is a bit like shout­ing in a crowded room full of shouty peo­ple; get­ting anyone’s atten­tion is prac­ti­cally impos­si­ble. Unless you’re famous already, as it seems proper celebri­ties who join Twit­ter enjoy instant popularity.

I’m only an inter­net celebrity, which should mean some­thing on, um, you know, the inter­net, but it doesn’t. So how does one get noticed on Twitter?

I’m tak­ing the long view, much like I did with blog­ging. If you just keep doing what­ever it is you do, peo­ple will find you and wor­ship you like the one true liv­ing god you are.

The other ques­tion is, how much atten­tion do I want to get on Twit­ter? How much atten­tion do I want to get full stop? I already do OK here in my tiny lit­tle cor­ner of the internet.

I’ll let you in on a lit­tle secret, this web­site is actu­ally prof­itable. I bring in more than I spend, though nat­u­rally that doesn’t include my very valu­able time, which you can’t put a price on.

Well, you could really, I get £750 a day, plus expenses, but you get to keep the pho­tos I take of your hus­band shag­ging his sec­re­tary. Oh no, that’s what a pri­vate detec­tive gets!

If I ever won the lot­tery, I would hire a team of pri­vate detec­tives to dig up dirt on my list of ene­mies. Everyone’s got some­thing secret lurk­ing in their lives that they wouldn’t want any­one to know about. I’d like to know.

Sorry, I attended a spe­cial screen­ing of Frost/Nixon last night and I think a bit of Tricky Dicky’s sleaze rubbed off on me. He famously had an ene­mies list and used inves­ti­ga­tors to dig dirt up on peo­ple. Of course, he did it with tax payer’s money, I want to use the lot­tery cash I will never win because rarely buy a ticket.

My week on Twit­ter has been fun. With the ter­ri­ble win­ter weather here in the UK, I’ve been able to keep track of the snow­fall in real time, com­plete with pho­tos and travel updates. I got instant reac­tions to this week’s crackin’ Bat­tlestar Galac­tica episode and I learned that BBC Radio One DJ, Chris Moyles actu­ally seems like a decent guy.

Moyles (@CHRISDJMOYLES) has been a sur­prise on Twit­ter, he tweets loads and comes across as quite a nice fel­low. Who knew?

I posted my own snowy pho­tos and even a pic­ture of 2 of my cute lit­tle kitty cats. Awwwwww! I’ve also posted some jokes and some sur­real shit too, mainly for my own amusement.

I can cer­tainly see the appeal of Twit­ter. Its sim­ple to use and pro­vides a very focussed ser­vice. It is also extremely addic­tive and easy to dip in and out of many times through­out the day.

It may be that the nov­elty wears off for me and I will get bored of tweet­ing my every thought and action, but for now I’m a tweet­ing machine.

So what are you wait­ing for, don’t you wanna fol­low this hippy? I might lead you to where they are hid­ing the good drugs?

Screw that, if I knew where the good drugs were, I would be tak­ing them right now and not wast­ing my time typ­ing up this drivel!