New footbridge over the Nanny

This really has been taking a long time (though it didn't help that they were doing it over a rather rough winter). It's finally getting there though and we might actually be able to use it in a month or two (presumably after the local FFers open it). There are no permanent railings yet but the paths up to it are being laid and that's a pretty good sign. At least this one will be hard to burn and should last better.

Puppy loves his crab

Woody found a reasonably large crab swept up by the apparently endless East wind but can't figure out how to get at the meat. I have a feeling that this crab has been here a little too long to be the healthy option but it probably doesn't matter much as there isn't really anything he can do about it.

Shiny new Airport Express

I figured it would be handy to have one of these for the living room both to give me flexibility in placing the main base station and so that we can use it as an input for the surround. It works really well, especially with Airfoil from Rogue Amoeba which allows me to broadcast any BBC Real streams I can pick up.

It also makes a portable wifi base station for when we're off visiting somewhere. It's much better than the ones we have in the corporate apartments in Mountain View and obviously it'll be handy anywhere I'm visiting that only has fixed broadband.

Sleeping samurai

He certainly didn't seem to have a problem with me being in his master's office. It's definitely one of the nice things about a visit to the mothership that they're allowed dogs in the office there. It's amusing to be asked by a PFW who doesn't know you how you feel about dogs and their proximity to your keyboard.

Veg eating for real

Proof, if proof be need be, that I sometimes eat veg even when I'm not forced to. Of course the photo could be staged but I didn't want to share the whole green braces experience.

Clover Coffee Machine

Very flash coffee machine in work. It's about $11k of shiny latest-thing-in-caffeine-consumption and it's just sitting all forlorn in one of the random canteens in Mountain View. It apparently can make awesome coffee and I certainly found that it was possible to get very different flavours from the same beans.

The problem is, I think, that it needs someone more expert than me to really do it justice. For one thing, whoever had set it up initially had the brew time set way too high (it's sort of like a vacuum-pump version of a cafetiére) so I was getting only muddy rubbish. I had a lot of trouble finding the right value in a reasonable amount of time. That's just one of several usefully adjustable parameters (the other big one being brew temperature). Presumably one can just download suggestions for common beans (the initial values I tried were ones I remembered from a review of the machine).

What was odd was that I had planned to make a special trip up to SF to find a cafe with one on this trip over and yet I just stumbled onto this in the American Kitchen cafe near my building. It actually put me off bothering to find one in a cafe which I regret now as they would probably have done a better job with it.

Now that Starbucks have bought the manufacturer there are rumours that we'll see them in every mermaid store but it's conceivable that, despite their protestations to the contrary, they bought it to bury it.