Daily Movement

Here’s another recipe that is close to my favorite with a spiciness of 3 and sweetness of 3:

• 1 cup milk, 2% fat
• 30 grams 99% Cacao Scharffenberger Chocolate
• 15 grams or 1/16 cup confectioners sugar (white granulated, not powdered)
• 1/4 teaspoon and 1/16 teaspoon cardamom or cinnamon
• 1/8 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper

I cut back no chocolate and sugar from version 1 of the recipe.

Directions:

1. Heat milk gently, at no point going higher than 140 degrees fahrenheit.
2. Add chocolate, sugar, cardamom and chili powder.
3. wait until partly melted and then periodically mix for 1/4 second pulses with a hand blender until chocolate all dissolved.
4. Serve at 130.

The use of hand blender has side effect of frothing the milk which makes it have a richer taste, similar to steaming of the milk.

Here’s a recipe that is close to my favorite with a spiciness of 3 and sweetness of 3:

It is a slight variation of the Chili Hot Chocolate recipe here using less sugar I think.

• 1 cup milk, 2% fat
• 45 grams 99% Cacao Scharffenberger Chocolate
• 20 grams or 1/16 cup confectioners sugar (white granulated, not powdered)
• 1/4 teaspoon and 1/16 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/8 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper

I originally planned to use as much as 3/16 cup of sugar but i kept adding and mixing until the sweetness was right and I had only used about 1/16 cup.

Directions:

1. Heat milk gently, at no point going higher than 140 degrees fahrenheit.
2. Add chocolate. wait until partly melted and then periodically mix for 1 second with a hand blender.
3. Add cinnamon and chili powder and mix.
4. Add sugar to taste.
5. Serve at 130.

The use of hand blender has side effect of frothing the milk which makes it have a richer taste, similar to steaming of the milk.

I was somewhat surprised at the amount of chocolate required to flavor 1 cup of milk. 1.6 ounces (45g) of chocolate looks like a lot, but I suppose that is why the flavor is so rich.

Mocafe Mexican spiced chocolate, Azteca D’oro 1519

Back in August, when I was in Stuttgart, Germany, I stopped by the Mercedes Benz museum. They had a demonstration of a restored one cylinder four stroke gasoline engine “car” — the Benz Patent Motorwagen. It was the first one built in 1886.

We’ve come a long way since then, but I can imagine how exciting it was to drive one of these back then.

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Dagoba Organic Xocolatl Hot Chocolate

• Preparation: 8 ounces 2% milk, 3 tablespoons powder, heated to 140 degrees, residual heat to 160 degrees.
• Sweetness: 2
• Spiciness: 5
• Ingredients: organic evaporated cane juice, organic cacao powder, organic unsweetened chocolate, chiles, cinnamon
• Tasting notes:

  The spiciness surprised me! I would prefer more sweetness and less spiciness. This just goes to show that spiciness and sweetness are personal preferences.

Green & Blacks, Organic Maya Gold

• Preparation: 9 ounces 2% milk, 4 teaspoons powder, heated to 140 degrees, residual heat to 170 degrees.
• Sweetness: 2.5
• Spiciness: 1
• Ingredients: Organic raw cane sugar, Organic fat reduced cocoa powder (31%), Organic chocolate powder (15%), Organic cocoa liquor, Organic cocoa butter, organic powdered orange peel (0.7%), natural orange flavoring (0.7%), organic ground cinnamon (0.1%), organic ground nutmeg (0.1%), organic black pepper (0.09%)
• Tasting notes:

  It is more of essence of spices and flavors rather than a strong mix of spices. The lack of sweetness makes it a more savory drink. I would prefer more sweetness, and would have to do a side by side taste with the Winter Sippers, but I think the sweetness is even slightly less.

I rate the hot chocolate based on two factors: sweetness and spice on a scale of 1-5, 3 being the preferred value for me. E.g. a sweetness of 5 is more sweet than i would like it, sweetness of 1 is more bitter, and 3 is just right.

Of course, both sweetness and spice are individual preferences, but I think the relative comparisons are accurate. If you try one particular chocolate and are looking for something spicier or less sweet, you’ll know how the other chocolate drinks compare.

Coupa Cafe spiced hot chocolate — actually Spicy Maya produced by Chuao

• Preparation: it varies.
• sweetness: 4
• spice: 3
• tasting notes:

  over a number of different days, i’ve had the sweetness be slightly sweeter than desired (4) to very sweet (5) — think those carnation instant chocolate packets where you just add hot water. However even on the bad days, the spiciness rescues the chocolate for me.

The Spice Hunter’s Winter Sippers Spiced Cioccolata

• Preparation: 6 oz cold 2% milk, 3 tablespoons powder, heated to 140 degrees, reaching 160 degrees with residual heat, i.e. milk was not scalded in this experiment.
• sweetness: 3
• spice: 2
• ingredients: sugar, cocoa processed with potassium carbonate, chocolate, corn starch, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, allspice, red pepper
• tasting notes:

  sweetness is right on for me. it degree of sweetness makes it more of a savory drink than as a dessert.

Starbuck’s Chantico

• sweetness: 5
• spice: 0
• tasting notes:

  if i can remember back when, Chantico was only served in at most 6 ounce cups and it was so thick that you could only stand 6 ounces at a time. In its form back then, it was basically a 390 calorie melted candy bar. This drink had potential with tuning, but unfortunately it didn’t evolve enough to survive. I ordered the drink once, maybe twice at most and then moved on from that experience. Origins of word Chantico, and a home made recipe for Chantico if you want to re-experience one.

I don’t want to get on jwz’s shitlist, but in response to his message about backups not RAID, I think RAID for storing backups is still a reasonable approach, although the ZFS folks would still balk about silent failures, i.e. media or hardware that has corrupted bits.

Since my parent’s PC died and all our baby photos were on there, I decided to set them up with a mandatory backup system that doesn’t require their involvement. Fortunately, the system death was due to a bad motherboard or power supply and the hard disk itself is intact. However, it’s only a matter of time when the disk dies too.

I also set up VNC for remote access so that I can troubleshoot problems remotely without me having to guess what “that blinking thing” is over the phone.

SyncBackSE runs nightly and does incremental backups of the entire system (except for OS portion which can be reinstalled).

Using a VPN (Hamachi, now LogMeIn) allows me to not worry so much about security, but there are some layers of security, albeit weak, beyond just the VPN for good measure. Samba requires a user and password using NT LANMAN authentication, but it doesn’t encrypt the data connection unfortunately. VNC requires a password, but does not encrypt the data channel.

I am still somewhat skeptical about Hamachi’s security… Every insider has their price at which they’re willing to engage in corruption. I just hope Hamachi’s developers continue to be well paid… Here’s a diagram of the setup. Note that “bfraid2″ stands for Big F*ing RAID 2nd incarnation. More on that later…

Update 10-Nov-2007:
Backing up 160+ GB over DSL the first time is slow. I’m hoping the incrementals will not be significant. I have the SyncBackSE job only run for a few hours at a time so the first full backup will take some number of days to complete.

in searching for SuperCrunchables 2.0, aka supercrunching in the web 2.0 space, …

This is interesting — two search engines that focus just on twitter output. I suppose you could get some kind of collective immediate intelligence just by searching.

e.g. whether you should watch a particular movie opening night, such as “Gone Baby Gone” which apparently did much worse in the box office at $6MM compared to “30 days and 30 nights” at $16MM, but also apparently liked by people who did watch it (below):

• buzztter results for “Gone Baby Gone”
• terraminds results for “Gone Baby Gone”

I also did a check on Rendition and didn’t see much buzz about it other than one person who said it confused them. i suppose that is also reflective of the even lower box office turnout of $4.2MM, seen at MovieWeb 10/19/07 weekend results

As an update of How to get rid of ants, let me share a technique that seems to be working.

I’ve been trying the Ortho Home Defense Max spray, active ingredient of Bifenthrin. You spray the holes or crevices where you see ants coming out of or going into. A little while later, no ants use those holes any more. Eventually, the ants find a new way to get in and you repeat the process of spraying the deterrent into the crevice.

It is supposed to last for 12 months, and it has actually kept the garage area free of ants for a few days now. The ants did manage to find a new entrance in the last day, but after spraying that too, the trail stopped. Maybe the spray doesn’t actually kill, but as long as it keeps them out of the house, that’s good enough for me.