H. Mijail's Blog

I bought recently a Tchibo Cafissimo espresso machine. I had been pondering about Nespresso, Zespresso and some other, but this one finally convinced me. There was preciously little information online about this particular machine, so I thought I could help someone. These are the things I would have liked to know before buying it and/or which helped me decide. My requirements were coffee capsules and milk frothing. I would have liked to have the option to use non-capsule coffee, but looks like there is no such machine. Also, I preferred having a steam wand for frothing the milk myself instead of the frothing unit of other machines (since I wanted to be as close as possible to "the real thing"). Frothing devices seem to be good-but-not-the-same, from the opinions I have been reading online. Also, they seem to have a tendency to stop working. Coffee from capsules of course is also "not-the-same", but everyone seems to accept that it is pretty good, and I since I ...

I am having to translate a horribly old program (1992?, DOS' Turbo Pascal)… and in german, to make it funnier… to an only-slightly-less-horribly-old environment (Delphi 4, circa 1999). To think that I was complaining about how outdated Borland's C++ Builder 5 felt… oh my. I guess/hope/fear that later there will be a more modern target. But that will be easy, given that by then I should understand everything and the program itself is not complicated.

I remembered something like "the eyes still looked like asking if, whatever it was the universe was doing to him, would it please stop doing it". Douglas Adams, but ... where, what exactly? Some googling shows that the correct fragment was from "So long, and thanks for all the fish": "Only the eyes still said that whatever it was the Universe thought it was doing to him, he would still like it please to stop."  I can't remember why I thought the best book was "Hitch Hiker´s Guide to the Galaxy"; simply thumbing through SLATFATF has made me want to read it again. Perhaps it was the most... humane of the lot. The love story was so touching. The descriptions of the fish bowl, of how Arthur sensed the strangeness of the new Earth. And Fenchurch's disappearance was so… suddenly cruel.  I love so much Adams' style. Just recenty finished (finally!) "Thief of time" by Pratchett, and tried to stop comparing him to Adams and let ...

Finally one day I force myself to get almost 8 solid hours of sleep. Too many things to do, big and small; to many cracks for them to slip through. Enough times of wanting to stop and... think... and... feel. In the morning I find Mail.app crashing. WTF? I remember about haxies, inputmanagers, the works. Should be clean, but recently found and deleted an unwelcome Smart Crash Reporter. Check. There it is again. Trash it. Google for it; how to avoid them in the future? Nothing definite (will try folder actions for alerts + file named "smart crash reporter" so it can't be created; if that trick worked for a trojan, should work for something less evil). But meanwhile I found that in the list of programs using Smart Crash Reporter is Quicksilver, which I am perennialy running. (too easy / out-of-the-blue to be reliable, but Mail is not crashing any more...) Quicksilver. So much time w/o updating, and it never seems to do automatically. (still didn't finish watching the...