In any case, I was really happy to win a one evening coffee course at Robert Paulig’s Coffee Institute in Helsinki. The course was simply awesome – great tips for brewing coffee, a lot of free coffee, different coffee varieties, really good time, some more coffee, a little bit of espresso, a few cappuccinos, some Irish coffee, Frezza Mocha, French coffee, hotshots, and oh – just when you thought they’d run out of coffee – a few more cups of the world’s most addictive beverage! If you ever get a chance to participate, I highly recommend this course. First part of the course – which coffee goes with which pastry:

Guatemala, Ethiopia, Kenya, Colombia – all really good, but you need to watch out what kind of pastry you serve with each. They recommend you should always serve darker roast with spicier foods, for example cheese cake with French roast, and mild roast with mildly flavored foods. Sounds pretty logical, doesn’t it? If you serve a very strong roast with subtly flavored cake, you will not taste any of the finer aromas of the cake, and on the other hand, mildly roasted coffee will not taste much like coffee when served with very spicy foods.

Now on to the main thing: How to brew great coffee. 10 easy steps should do it:

1. Buy a real coffeemaker. The water needs to heat to 92-96°C. A cheap machine will not heat the water enough and will result in a disappointment. A Moccamaster should do (no, they didn’t bribe me, honest!).
2. Clean your coffeemaker daily. Wash the coffee pot, funnel and other necessary parts of the machine with sodium bicarbonate (cooking soda), use a solution of 3 table spoons per 1 liter of water in order to wash off any coffee grease accumulated in the coffeemaker.
3. Store the coffee grounds in your fridge, always seal the package properly and never pour the grounds to another container – oxygen is the coffee bean’s worst enemy!
4. Use clean, fresh water. Move to Finland if the water in your area sucks.
5. Always use the right size filter, never buy cheap filters.
6. Don’t pour water in to the coffeemaker with your coffee pot, otherwise coffee grease will start to collect inside the coffeemaker, resulting in a rancid taste at worst.
7. When pouring grounds in to the filter, even the grounds gently – but don’t shake the filter to do so. If you do, fine coffee dust will fill the pores of the filter resulting in an uneven brew.
8. Use 7g of grounds per 1.25dl of fresh water.
9. When ready, stir the coffee gently with a spoon, otherwise the strongest coffee will be left at the bottom.
10. The coffee will stay good for max half an hour. Enjoy!

All work no blog makes Late a…. rich boy I guess.

Been playing with my N95 lately. Why do people always compare the N95 and the iPhone? They are two totally different devices – one of them is a useless toy and the other one is what computers have become – a superb PDA, phone, camera and GPS in one shell. Revolutionary touchscreen interface? Nice, but I find real features much more useful. With the N95 I can geotag my pictures automagically and send them to flickr instantly. How cool is that?

So far I haven’t had much time to experiment with third party apps, apart from twibble, which makes twittering kind of faster and allows you to geotag tweets automagically. ShoZu does the same thing for images. For screenshots, Antony Pranata’s screenshot seems to do it’s job. GoogleMaps and Gmail are simply a must.

The only thing that sucks about the N95 is the battery – with GPS and 3G it’ll run out in couple of hours But that’s still better than no 3G and no GPS.

Blogging is hard. Anyway, Sini – I hope you’re happy now

Yeah, that’s me. Pretty accurate picture actually. Simpsons avatar

If you’re not big into death metal, you might have missed a unique piece of recent political commentary in the form of a new album by Megadeth with the clever title, “United Abominations.”

If you are big into death metal, chances are that you have au contraire missed Megadeth’s latest album, because it’s not a death metal album at all. If you’re going to blog about a foreign topic (pun only slightly intended) the least thing you could do is check the facts. Megadeth has always been a thrash metal band, and there’s a big difference between death and thrash. Most death metal fans will be offended if you dare call Megadeth a death metal band.

Anyway, the folk at FP Passport are glad they don’t have to listen to the album (which tells a lot about their prejudice), because Mark Leon Goldberg over at the U.N. Dispatch already did. Sam duPont asks:

What effect will this exchange have on Megadeth fans’ opinions of the U.N.? That question was probably best answered by user “madeinquebec,” who left this comment on Mustaine’s post: I don’t care, Megadeth rulez.

Yes, we get it, that is just so funny, stooopid Megadeth fans! Judging by that one comment it would seem they believe Dave no matter what. But why should a Megadeth record affect the opinions of metal fans in the first place (as duPont seems to believe)? Did he even take a look at the rest of the comments? Most of them seem to ridicule Dave Mustaine, and quite rightly so. It’s a well known fact that Dave is seriously delusional and always has been. I think it’s very lame to attack an enemy that no-one takes seriously in the first place. But, it gets you some points nonetheless.

Many years ago, when I was fourteen and living in The Netherlands, Dave Mustaine was interviewed by a Dutch radio station and asked about his opinion on the proposed legalization of hard drugs in the Netherlands. “I don’t live here so I don’t give a shit” was his abrupt answer. What an asshole, I thought. While I’ve always had great respect for Dave as a brilliant song writer and guitar player, I’ve never cared one bit about his views on politics, war or religion. As a matter of fact that “I don’t live here so I don’t give a shit” kind of stuck to my head. Still today, whenever somebody asks me about local affairs in the USA, I always reply “I don’t live there so I don’t give a shit”. That’s my tribute to Dave Mustaine.

So, if you need an inexperienced and lazy worker with no sense of humour please hire me. Send your offers to late (at) finnmetal (dot) com.

Don’t bother if your company does not offer free Red Bull and unlimited coffee breaks.

[humongous size pic]

Somebody (or something – which is a much more frightening thought) had stepped on this poor little Viviparous lizard at our kesämökki and left it dying on the porch. The viviparous lizard, which we call sisilisko, is the world’s most northern lizard and the only lizard native to Finland. It isn’t poisonous and it doesn’t bite. Don’t try to capture one though, because it is a protected species in Finland. If you harass one, it might drop it’s tail, altough I never saw that happen when I used to catch these as a child. These guys are über-cute and are crawling all over our kesämökki

Yeah, not a bad victory. Oh and I totally agree, Helsinki is pretty hot.

I hadn’t driven that much during the last few years, so I was more than a bit nervous attending an evaluative driving test today (arvioiva-ajo in Finnish). I friggin hate cars. I hate traffic and I hate driving, just the kind of atitude you need for a driving test (although you can’t fail the evaluative test, you just get feedback on how you’re driving). Surprisingly, the test was pretty fun and I almost enjoyed driving. The verdict was that I drive pretty well, although I could be a little more careful and take less risks in traffic. The emphasis was on economic driving. I first drove a rougly 11km round driving as I usually would, then did the same round, but following the instructions from the driving instructor. During the first round the car consumed 9.0 L/100km and the second round only 7.3 L/100km. The average speed was 32 km/h for the first round and 33 km/h for the second.

So just by changing your driving habits slightly, you can save 1.7 L/100km. If the average price of gas (petrol) in Finland is €1.3, this means you can save €2.21 per every 100 km. If every litre of gas produces roughly 2.3 kg of CO₂, you can save 3.9 kg of CO₂ per every 100 km. If you drive 20000 km per year, you can save €442 in a year with economic driving and produce 780 kg less CO₂.

Therefore, if you want to save the world, learn economic driving and consume 19% less gas. If you fly, you don’t have to give a rat’s ass about the CO₂ emissions from your vehicle, because you’ll be procucing 155.4 g of CO₂ per rpk (revenue passenger kilometer) anyway. For example, if you fly 8769.8 kilometers from London to Los Angeles you’ll be contributing 3.18 tonnes of carbon dioxide to our atmosphere. We only have one atmosphere. That means I’ll be breathing your shit. Now if you really want to save the planet – don’t fly.

If you find it impossible to stop flying, you can at least quit breathing. An average human exhales 310 kg of carbon dioxide per year. It’s not much, but it’s still something.

Some might be wondering how 1 litre of gas can produce more than twice its own weight of CO₂. I’ll let you think about. It’s just mind-boggling, isn’t it?

They also have a handy caffeine and sugar database. Found via kulutusjuhla.