70cities blog

TwitterIgnore

Paul — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 17:58:00 +0000

I've been playing with Greasemonkey a bit lately as I wanted to refresh my Javascript/DOM foo. I needed something to build, so I searched in my big red plastic bucket of irritations and knocked up a user script that lets you hide Twitter tweets from a definable list of users without actually unfollowing them - so you can selectively ignore people for periods of time without them being any the wiser - thus avoiding any potential awkwardness. Social networks are delicate things - they're made up of humans, after all.

(This was inspired during SXSWi, when half my Twitter follow list went and I didn't, and the endless noise about it got quite wearing - but I didn't want to unfollow anyone as my Twitter universe is generally quite lovely and interesting).

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25365

Mux it up

Paul — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 12:01:00 +0000

In common with everyone else with an internet connection this week, I heart Muxtape a lot. Simple, no-nonsense, works. Here's mine, although I've no idea how often I'll ever update it. Needs RSS to track changes, perhaps? Mmm. Then I could plumb it into the uberfeed and whatnot.

In other news, since VD Day passed and I shut down all the Amazon EC2 stuff, I've been mostly working, going to the Isle of Wight, drinking beer, eating nice food, hacking around with a potentially-quite-useful Twitter hack using Greasemonkey and not having my hair cut...

Be My Anti-Valentine - a technical perspective

Paul — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 11:30:00 +0000

After many hours of toil, Meg and myself opened the doors to this year's By My Anti-Valentine site a couple of weeks ago. Redesigned, revamped, relaunched with the hope that it won't fall over under the strain of the traffic it generates on Valentine's Day itself, as it has always done previously.

Given that my involvement in the project is one of technical architect, developer and sysadmin (Meg is the ideas, UX and design brains of the effort), it's probably worth me explaining a bit about the technology that drives the site and the problems that we came across last year and have tried to solve (or at least mitigate) this year.

By 2007, Meg had been running the VD cards site seasonally for six years, driven by a variety of successive flat-file systems and ultimately a generic PHP-based freeware card sending application (Sendcard, I think) that just about did the job but frequently caused her server to go belly-up once the traffic to the site reached its inevitable peak on the 14th February.

The problem was that the "choose card-send email to recipient" workflow was completely synchronous and linear within the application, so the emails were dispatched to the outgoing email server within the same web-spawned PHP Apache process. Naturally, once a few hundred people at a time were hitting the 'Send Card' button, the host's SMTP service would run out available connections and stop responding. Also, PHP 4's rather, ahem, unpredictable DB connection handling under load would generally explode along similar lines. Cue lots of server errors and general mayhem as the whole thing fell apart.

So, when I stepped in last year and volunteered to make the problems go away with a bespoke web app written in Perl to suit Meg's desired functionality, I made a few sensible design decisions. Over the years I've had to deal with my fair share of scaling problems and integration issues, so I built in a few tricks of the trade.

As it turned out, the site worked nicely for the few weeks before the 14th of February.. until it didn't. As it turned out, the traffic the site got was so enourmous that even moving it to its own dedicated, beefy server (kudos to Pair, Meg's hosting people, for being extraordinarily quick to do this) couldn't make it cope. Even extensive caching couldn't save the server from falling over.

So for 2008, whilst reconsidering our options, I decided to give Amazon EC2 - their Xen virtualisation cloud - a whirl. I'd heard plenty about it and had tinkered with virtualisation at work, but never gone the whole hog, and the cynic in me didn't buy the spiel that spinning up working application instances was as easy as a web service call.. but yes, by gum, it works a treat. Initial setup is a bit fiddly, but tools like the EC2 Firefox UI and S3Fox are a godsend when you're trying to do stuff quickly.

The site runs on a group of replicated server instances running a heavily customised version of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy, all identical with the exception of one (which I call the 'master', though not a Doctor Who homage) that also runs MySQL and the card-sending backend app. All the other instances connect to the master database when creating a new card or retrieving one for display. This is a pretty naïve architecture, but it works as the percentage of card senders against the overall site traffic is pretty small (less than 7% of visitors choose to send a card). Therefore MySQL isn't doing very much at all, and I didn't need to spin up a separate MySQL server instance to cope, which reduced the overall cost and was one less server instance to manage.
The rest of the application stack is fairly standard - Apache 2, FastCGI, Perl.

So what happened on the day itself? Well, we had a *tiny* bit of a wobble at around 13:00 GMT, when the east coast of America woke up (55% of users come from the USA), but I coped by spinning up another server instance and offloading some of the remaining site furniture onto Amazon S3 with some 302 redirects - which made a huge difference. Once the traffic started to drop off on the 15th, I was able to decommission three instances and balance the load across the remaining two, which coped admirably.

Paul's Top N Web Scalability Tips

Never maintain state on your web server. The moment you have to keep a user on a specific application instance for their state to be persisted, you lose all hope of ever scaling the sharp end horizontally. Keep state in your database (or on a shared filesystem if you're a masochist).

Decouple the web interface from backend systems. You don't send emails straight from a web-spawned process. You just don't. In fact, you shouldn't connect to anything other than a database server. Email servers are strange, unpredictable beasts and they generally need to be handled with care. Don't expose one to a process pipeline that you can't explicitly control (namely, a public web server!).

So, when a card instance is 'created' by a user on the VD site, an email object is created and stashed into a database table that effectively acts as a queue. This gets polled by a cron job at regular intervals and the emails get despatched in series. This means the email server is only ever under a constant load, which can be managed depending on what sort of performance you need.

Cache everything you can cache. If a page never changes, save it out to a cache directory on your filesystem and have the web server serve that instead of building a dynamic page on every hit. Thankfully the VD site only really needs to invoke the application when someone sends a card or retrieves one from a link they've been sent, so I took advantage of that and had easy cache-building methods that I could call to generate flat HTML pages. ('Proper' setups have caching loadbalancers like ZXTMs in front of their servers that can do this transparently, but of course I don't have that luxury and was trying to KISS). Which all leads me on to...

mod_rewrite is your friend. I can't rave about mod_rewrite enough. It's easy to get scared by URL rewriting if you're not comfortable with regexes and the general HTTP request handling mechanism in Apache, but it's actually incredibly simple to use with a bit of messing around and most modern web frameworks rely on some form of rewrite engine. The ability to abstract your URL scheme from the physical filesystem brings endless possibilities.

The VD site uses it not only to map its tidy URLs to the application endpoint (what us old-schoolers still call a CGI script), but to rewrite certain URLs to serve flat files from the cache directory but keeping the external URL the same, so turning it off has no effect on the end user. Also, with the flick of a hash character in the global .htaccess file, I can have the all the bandwidth-heavy images served from a CDN - Amazon S3 in this case - rather than the app servers.

Always use INSERT DELAYED when you don't need the row back - Class::DBI, the Perl ORM engine the VD site uses, isn't very good at this, so I had to roll my own methods here, but it was worthwhile - you save a few vital queries when you're stashing your state away and trying to get back to completing the user's request as quickly as possible.

In retrospect I wouldn't have used Class::DBI in the first place, but that's another story..

Phew! That's it over for another year, then. There's a whole bunch of other stuff I could go into (the joys of dealing with Spamcop..), but that's the story thus far. I'm chuffed at having got through a Valentine's Day without having to watch a single server helplessly grind to a halt under the weight of the traffic burst that a site like BMAV inevitably generates, and incredibly impressed that Amazon EC2 makes virtualisation accessible and affordable for projects like this. EC2 FTW!

Sad news

Paul — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 23:06:00 +0000

Curry Hell man dies

Tragic news. I had the honour of working closely with Mr Latif back in the day when I was a jack-of-all-trades web monkey, and maintained the Rupali and Curry Hell websites. I can honestly say I've never met a man more dedicated to the twin pursuits of selling incredibly hot curry to pissed-up Geordies, and honest-to-goodness self-publicity.

A man so generous, he thought nothing of ordering me a free cab back to the office when a lunch-hour visit turned into a three-hour curry/booze fest - whereupon I fell asleep in the sofa in reception and got woken up by the marketing director of the coincidentally recently-deceased Pennine Windows, who was coming in expecting to update his web site.

He'll be sorely missed. Particularly by anyone who had a lamb phaal at his restaurant in recent days.

RIP Mr Latif. Off to his very own Curry Heaven, festooned with party hats and Cobra beer.

Gamed

Paul — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 10:02:00 +0000

I barely ever play computer games. Consoles, whathaveyou - I've just never had much of an interest in any of it. Back in the 80's, when I was growing up and spent hours slaving over a hot ZX Spectrum, I was far more interested in learning how to write stuff and make it do interesting things than spending hours killing aliens or whathaveyou.

The games I liked then, and still do to this day, are the really simple platform/puzzle type ones. Lunar Jetman, Spellbound, Jet Set Willy, Technician Ted, the Dizzy games, Starquake. My later Atari ST, primarily a games machine much like the Amiga, spend most of its life playing simple platformers. When Driller came out and pioneered the immersive 3D worlds that everyone's used to now, I got bored pretty quickly. Later, when I had a PC, stuff like Rise of the Triads, and Sin gave way to pretty brain-dead stuff like Carmageddon. And even then only briefly. I get bored with games so easily.

In fact, in those rare times I find myself in a gamey mood, I don't reach for my non-existent PS2 or Wii and fire up World of Timewasting or whatever - I use a Spectrum emulator and play Starquake, as I have been for over 20 years (I've only finished it twice - I find the gameplay fun, not the end goal). I just don't get games, really. I just don't care.

Maybe it's the same reason I barely read any fiction or watch any films? Just writing that down makes me sound like some uncultured idiot, I know - but the truth is I get enough from current affairs, technology, comedy and music to keep me occupied for a lifetime and I sort of marvel at those who find the time to glue themselves to an Xbox 360 for hours on end or watch tons of films/boxsets. I can only conclude that I got short-changed somewhere along the line and everyone else in the world gets a thirty-hour day.

HNY

Paul — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 23:45:00 +0000

Happy new year! Just when I was finally getting into the swing of 2007, the damn thing goes and ends.

Highlights of 2007 included:

Going to San Francisco and discovering Northern California
Doing some interesting stuff at work after a period of uncertainty
Snooker: seeing the Masters and the World Championships in Sheffield
Gadgets: new Macbook in Feb, and iPod Touch in November
Turning thirty (am fine with it now, in fact I really quite like it)
Spending lots of time with M and P and other nice people
Listening to the Beatles a lot

Lowlights included:

Project getting canned
Subsequent project floundering and getting canned
Not seeing my friends from the North nearly enough
Various worries, stresses and strains I couldn't do anything/much about
Being afflicted with weird sinusy problems as well as having a really crap hayfever year

2008? Changes afoot... hopefully.

Paul — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 23:20:00 +0000

Finally, now I've reached the correct side of the Christmas holidays, I can relax a bit. The last few weeks have been intense really took it out of me. The physical manifestations of this have been interesting - big bags under my eyes, not having a haircut for four months (big mistake - I looked scruffy, but not the 'good' scruffy I was half-aiming for - just 'bloody awful' scruffy), etc.

Anyway, the new version of the thing I work on launched and it's all gone very well. Now to rest up for a bit and do very little for a bit, except eat cheese, drink wine and generally expand. Marvellous.

It's a test.

Paul — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 14:57:00 +0000

Test.

Dear Santa...

Paul — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 23:38:00 +0000

I want..

To not think about work for a few days on the trot
Much less inadvertent exposure to Russell Brand/Winehouse/Jo Brand/Spice 'Girls'
Less worry
Beatles remasters
To spend less time on buses
Last.fm to work with my iPod Touch without having to jailbreak the thing
Spend more time hanging out with M and P
To see my friends more
More sleep
A haircut
More coffee
More music
A decent suit that doesn't make me look like a Suit
A greater variety of lunch options
To learn the banjo
A house
World peace

Kthxbai!

Ding dong

Paul — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 08:41:00 +0000

Despite being one third of the way into December, it's only just dawned on me that it's Christmas very soon. In, like, 15 days. All the music channels on telly are rotating their crappy Christmas songs playlists - which, as they've got so much airtime to fill, are at least throwing up some amusingly bad, previously forgotten festive tunes. Paul McCartney and the fucking Frog Chorus, anyone? I saw it yesterday afternoon for the first time in 25 years and remembered exactly why it's never included on cheapo Chrimbo compilation CDs - even in a genre so pant-wettingly mawkish and feeble as christmas singles, it has a level of awfulness that stands proudly alone. Shudder. Next to this, Cliff Richard's seasonal efforts are verging on a punk ethic.

Anyway, Christmas. Shit! I've barely done a thing about it, what with one thing and another. Must knuckle down and get organising. Unfortunately, this week is already stacked full of Christmas parties and a slew of work to finish off. Who in the name of God decided to put our works Xmas party on the night before a big deployment? (Maybe it's the other way around - even so, someone needs a poke in the eye with a sharp stick).

I really suck at blogging

Paul — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 21:29:00 +0000

Let's face it, it's just not happening, is it? I still might turn this into a link/video/mp3log though. I do plenty else around the web; I just don't do much of the whole writing thing. Too many people do it better than I.

Of various things of disinterest that've been happening lately, I bought a new iPod the other day. One of those touchy ones in fact, and it's very nice. Twice the space of me old Nano, and video playback - all very nice, but those features pale into comparison compared to the multitouch interface. I'm no feverent Apple fanboy, but my word, it's a thing of beauty to use. Coincidentally, I got a new mobile recently too (a Nokia 6500) with a view to using that as a bit of a mobile video playing doodah - but despite it having the technical chops to do so, the interface is so clunky and awkward that I completely gave up after about ten minutes. Now I can catch up with the new series of the Boosh on the bus home from work. Marvellous. The future's arrived!

However, despite what Steve Jobs and other Californians might think, ubiquitous open wifi is still rather a rarity. Even in my office, where there's dozens of sniffable networks, only one is unencrypted and even then it won't give me an IP address, most likely being MAC address-restricted. And I spend half of my life on buses anyway. So for that, my phone still trumps (and actually has a fairly decent browser to be getting on with).

That's about it, though. Other than that; work, sleep. Lie around. Repeat.

Paul — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 09:32:00 +0000

I've been on holiday!

Yes. Hence my silence recently. There's been a much-needed break in the wilderness, away from all things technological and busy. It's been wonderful. Now I sit in a plush hotel in Leeds, soaking up the free wi-fi as we made the sensible decision to break the journey back to London in two and meet up with some old friends - which was wonderful. I'm full of eggs benedict, good coffee and Frosties. Now it's time to hit the road and get back home.

I'm so behind on everything it's pointless trying to catch up on it all. I even gave up halfway through reading all my usual webcomics; somehow, daily content doesn't work so well when trying to read a lot of it in one go.. maybe I need to look at one of those webcomic reading apps I hear people talking about.

Applause?

Paul — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 10:50:00 +0000

From an email I just received inviting me to apply for tickets to bunch of new TV shows:

"***COMING SOON*** THE KATIE PRICE & PETER ANDRE CHAT SHOW"

Arrrrrrgh! The death of reason is finally upon us. Make it stop!

Paul — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 08:10:00 +0000

So the Adblock saga that's been rumbling along for a while is finally reaching a peak, with people cottoning on to the fact that it's potentially (in theory) damaging to the very revenue streams that make the Web 2.0 world so tasty, supple and pliant. So much so that you've even got mechanisms for sites to block Adblock-enabled Firefox browsers.

This is a bit nuts, no? To me it smacks of classic internet kneejerkery. Where's the evidence that all these bottom lines are being eroded? There isn't any - this is all supposition and FUD at the moment.

Adblock, and browser plugins like it, came about because web advertising had become so intrusive, disruptive and unruly that the hacker community came up with a solution. You very rarely hear anyone bitching about Google Adsense ads, as they're both textual and usefully contextual, and anyone who wants to argue that 200Kb Flash movies choking my bandwidth and sprouting both alongside, above and directly over the content users are trying to access is in any way a good idea needs their head thoroughly scrutinised. The very existence of adblocking tools should be sending a very clear message to web advertising companies - we don't want to be beaten over the head with your shit. Plus, do you really want to be engaging in a incremental bunfight with the hacker community, either side progressively defeating the other's measures? Is it really a good use of everyone's time?

Ouch

Paul — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 22:16:00 +0000

Being stung on the lip by a wasp fucking hurts. I know this, because it happened to me this evening.

Thank $deity for the Internets though, because hundreds of unverified old-wives' remedies were merely a judicious Google away. It's now much better, thanks - lemon juice really is the business for just about every random problem or malady that can curse your life.

Owwwww.

I'm going to try and make more of an effort to post here, but I don't think one of those '10 ways to get more stuff done NOW!' blogs is the way to go (not least because I'm fundamentally very lazy) but I'm a senior software engineer and I ought really to have more to say about what I've encountered over the years working on the internets than I have in the past.

Then again, there's no shortage of self-appointed pundits willing to spout grindingly obvious platitudes about software and software engineering - why should I add myself to their ranks? Can I add anything of worth? Only time will tell.

What happened?

Paul — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 07:47:00 +0000

Wow, I fail at blogging.

I've been busy. New jobs have that effect.

Meanwhile, here's some Neil Innes:

Snot party

Paul — Sun, 27 May 2007 10:31:00 +0000

Someone was really rude to me this week. I was slightly taken aback at it, as they're a long-time acquaintance of mine and there really wasn't any need for it, as I was being super-friendly to begin with. It's annoyed me for several days now, though. I'm not tolerant of this sort of thing, especially when it's an affectation (as I suspect it to be). Grr.

Hay fever is back, yet again, with a vengeance. I've been seeped in warm, runny snot for the last few days and it's really depressing me. I've been afflicted with it since the age of six - and now I'm 30, I still haven't 'grown out of it' like all the doctors over the years have said I would. And yes, I've tried every pill/spray on the planet - and they don't work. I am seemingly condemned to ride out all the summer months of my life like this - sneezing, coughing, itching, sitting around in a dazed trance with my head slightly tilted back. Urgh.

Still - bank holiday, and a nice wet one at that. Perhaps I'll just pull myself together and ignore the interesting pulling and pushing going on in my sinuses and get out and do stuff. Maybe I'll mess around with Flash (a pertinent technology, as it happens). Maybe this, and maybe that.

Apple/Idlers

Paul — Tue, 22 May 2007 06:40:00 +0000

The recent outrage over Apple's Macbook displays being only 6-bit instead of 8-bit doesn't bother me in the slightest. My Macbook display is still great, light years away from what my iBook had, and still better than most regular laptop screens I see. So what if it's dithering? If you're going to do proper print design work on a laptop you'll be using an external monitor anyway - or you're some kind of idiot.

As someone who has, by and large, sat around in offices for the last eight years, The mystery of the daytime idle has often gripped me. I don't know if the picture in SF is different from anywhere else, but London is constantly teeming with people seemingly doing bugger all, all day. Of course, given that I work in Shepherd's Bush a good 50% of them are tramps, propped up against benches or sitting on steps, sinking cans of Tennent's Extra and shouting at each other. Come to think of it, San Francisco has a notable tramp population, but the author didn't seem to approach any..

Blumenwiese neben autobahn..

Paul — Sun, 13 May 2007 15:06:00 +0000

Crazy week. Loads happening. Can't talk about any of it. Argh!

Had a great weekend so far, though. Friday might, M and I went to see top indie electro-rocksters Maxïmo Park play at the Shepherd's Bush Empire. It's been ages since I've been to a non-club sort of gig, and they were incredibly good live - note-perfect, and incredibly tight. There's also something very compelling about Paul Smith's lyrics for me, given that I grew up more or less where he did and can vividly recognise a lot of the references, places and experiences he alludes to - "standing by the Monument just waiting for the rain". It's been a long while since we had a true Geordie voice in the hit parade - no, Jimmy Nail doesn't count (and probably can't, either).

After that, it was up early on Saturday to hotfoot it (via train) to Brighton for Anna's 30th birthday party. Had enourmous fun seeing the extended family and meeting nice new people whilst munching quality sausages, along with a selection of disgustingly nice French cheeses. Then, in the evening we rushed back to London to catch the Eurovision 'Song' Contest - completely laughable, unfortunately, due to all the block voting going on. Even Sir Terence of Wogan seemed utterly crushed by the complete absence of any real notion of a song contest. I can't see it continuing in its current format for much longer..

Today, hay fever has rendered me helpless (again), despite it being cold, rainy and dull outside. Sniff. Can't do much but sit up straight and swallow snot. Urgh.

Cheeky

Paul — Sat, 05 May 2007 10:43:00 +0000

So I can't really say much about what's going on at the moment, except that I'm in a period of upheaval at work and I'm not sure how everything's going to land. It's exciting, scary and worrying in equal parts, and ultimately quite confusing. I'm at a very strange point in my career now - I'm not entirely sure I deserve it, but then a healthy dollop of self-doubt never did anyone any harm, did it?

Alongside this, I've been extending my social network, re-engaging with old friends, knocking on doors old and new and generally being a bit cheeky. I think that's OK, though; people don't usually mind a bit of cheekiness with the right approach. I seem to pull it off somehow. I'm a lot better at this kind of stuff that I was five years ago. Maybe hitting 30 has done me good.

I'm quite annoyed that Yamipod has stopped working with my iTunes, so I can't get what I'm playing on me iPod synced up to Last.fm - as I don't spend that much time listening to music at my desk at home, this is leading to an irritating skewing of my listening profile, which should either be 100% accurate or not there at all in my opinion. Of course, it's easy to worry too much about these things. No-one gives a toss but me, but I do find it still too much hard work to keep all the disparate bits of information I deal with all synchronised - although FacebookSync is a neat idea, keeping Facebook contacts synced with my Address Book on my Mac, which in turn syncs with my mobile phone - but I can't get it synced with my Gmail address book easily, or indeed anything else where I maintain contacts (ie. LinkedIn). All these tools are great, but they need to communicate with each other more.

Of course, if I could be bothered, I'd write something that attempted to do this - after all, the APIs are out there and I doubt I'm the only one with these sorts of needs. Facebook's developer stuff looks really nice, I ought to play with it.. RSS authentication would help a lot, but no-one's really doing this yet, although it's starting to pop up here and there.

Anyway, enough pontification. I'm off to eat some burned meat in a back garden in Thames Ditton.

Tony Blackburn On My Wireless

Paul — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 11:51:00 +0000

Ok, so this week hasn't seen an avalanche of neu-blogging here, but I've got my reasons. Work is an enourmous source of stress at the moment, with a whole cloud of uncertainty and worry about the very near future (which seems to get nearer every day). As a result, I've been distracting myself and haven't spent a great deal of time online. This morning, despite a will to get the hell out of the house and go and buy stuff, I found my domestic wind and cleaned the flat. Two hours later, I've been shopping for breakfast, hoovered, dusted, cleaned, tidied, washed out the cat litter tray and hung out washing to dry (it's a gorgeous clothes-drying day at least, and our novelty suspended clothesline never fails to amuse when in use). Now, I've just made an enourmous pot of strong, fresh coffee (see previous post) and I've been listening to Ronnie Corbett wibble away on the Jonathan Ross show. Pleasant enough, but that's just ended and now I've got Andrew Collins (or is it Stuart Maconie? One of them, anyway) playing shite comedy clips from 1980s stand-ups going "Ooh, technology? It's all over me head".

So, if Jasper Carrott couldn't get his head around his Betamax video in 1986, he's got bog all chance of being able to read this - so here goes:

JASPER CARROTT - YOU ARE NOT FUNNY. YOU HAVE NEVER BEEN FUNNY. YOU ARE A CRAP ERIC IDLE (AND HE'S BEEN FAIRLY CRAP TOO SINCE ABOUT 1979). GO AWAY. Oh, you have.

Now I'm listening to BBC Radio London and they've got some bloke who appears to be the bastard lovechild of Simon Bates and Tony Blackburn wibbling away. Oh - hang on - I've just checked, and it is Tony Blackburn! I can see him (and his rug) on the studio webcam right now! Fuck me. Well, if I was running BBC Radio London (a job which I may well be applying for soon..), I'd have Blackburn on all day, every day. His pleasing mix of 60's soul and inane, moronic wittering cannot be beaten.

(Choice comment from Blackburn: "I only have one thought a day". You're not kidding either, are you, Blackburn? You thought-facist.)

"Cuban coffee beans, there's none finer .."

Paul — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 15:35:00 +0000

"Yes, but those beans are useless without my electric coffee bean grinder.."

I've finally completed my transition into the bourgeoisie - for my 30th birthday last week, Meg bought me a Braun coffee grinder. That's right - I can now take the time to buy my very own coffee beans, grind the little bastards up into a potent powder, and brew it up to produce the freshest of all the caffiene delivery systems known to man.

I'm a bit of a coffee geek, and have been cafetiére-ing it for a good few years now, but never went as far as the whole self-grinding milarkey as I was never convinced that it could be that much better than the ground stuff you can buy everywhere. How wrong I was - right now I'm sipping a large mug of freshly ground goodness that defies all comparison with the stuff I've made before (thanks to Anna and Bobbie, who have supplied some massive bags of marvellous organic coffee beans to start me off).

Back when we were in San Francisco in March, we were staying in a quirky B&B on Union Street, which allegedly had a wifi spot but it refused to play ball with my Macbook (I know, I sound like the biggest arse in the world here, really I'm not) so we had to head to the next block to a indie cafe place that sported wifi and superb, freshly-ground stuff that kept me buzzing through our overnight flight back to London. I think it was that that started my mind wandering down the gourmet coffee obsessive route, to be honest. I've found I can't drink milky Starbucks coffee any more (apart from their brewed stuff which is actually fairly decent) and my morning hit - which I am useless without, unfortunately - generally comes in the form of a massive Americano from the friendly Polish ladies in the canteen. I've become somewhat infamous in morning meetings for never been seen without one. A coffee, that is - not a Polish lady. My relationship with the haphazard yet cheery serving wenches of White City is of a purely transactional nature.

Summer in the City

Paul — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 15:12:00 +0000

Testing, testing, 123.