So there’s been some substantial news and hubbub in the coffee world that I love so dearly. Mark Prince, high priest or the people’s best friend, announced the imminent availability of a scale-driven grinder from quality home enthusiast manufacturer Baratza. This is big news.

For a long time now (at least the couple years I’ve been paying attention) the coffee world has been pushing the importance of knowing the mass of coffee and water used when brewing. We’ve heard talk of integrating scales in espresso machines, in water boilers (and has happened), and now there’s the first bit of momentum with scale-enhanced grinders.

But not all is wine and roses. Cool heads have looked to pour cold water on good enthusiasm. Steve Leighton has his eyes on the prize, wanting the industry to put its resources into grind quality:

I really wish someone would build a great grinder before producing an ok one with a set of scales built in

He’s right, of course. Sizzle sells, but the steak matters. There are other ways, many other ways, to weigh ground coffee. You can time it, grind a pre-weighed amount, or even weigh after grinding. The point is, we can get around a lack of scale-based grinding on our own. We cannot get around poor grind quality.

But this isn’t a zero-sum game. There’s more than one grinder manufacturer! So, Baratza is making a scale for their grinder. Great! Uber is making a better grind.

And that’s how a healthy industry operates. Way to go, team!

The way we do server farms, however, is very different.  We just use one server and call it a “farm.”  That sounds even sillier.  How can one computer be like four computers?  Well, easy.  You just have four computer’s worth of processors, four computer’s worth of disks, and four computer’s worth of memory in one physical case.  You end up with one very beefy machine that you can optimize just like a many individual computers.  Pretty cool.

Well, at least I think it’s cool.

Right now, the app does coffee-to-water ratio calculations, as well as brew timing.  It can keep track of different brew types and their associated ratios and timer settings (countdown vs stopwatch, duration of timer, etc.).  I’m trying to get a couple of my coffee heroes to test it for me, we’ll just see how that goes.

In the meantime, I will be putting the final layer of spit-polish on and send it out to Apple.  I expect it to be in the store in the next two weeks.

Irkutsk, Siberia is a city next to the deepest lake in the world, and it is home to some amazing (I assume) hand-made wooden houses. Vlad, of Vladstudio.com fame, drove around the city documenting the houses as they are falling into disrepair. If you care about any of the following, you will love the gallery he created:

• Photography
• Architecture
• Lighting
• Wood
• Siberia
• Siberian Wooden Houses galleries

I love four out of those six, so I’m absolutely enamoured.

I really love music. There’s something about the tone and emotion of a song that can really affect your reality. Music, to me, is more than just what you hear; you have to agree with what the artist is doing in order to enjoy it.

Put another way, when I’m in a really bad mood driving in rush hour, the last thing I want to listen to is classical music; it’s too calm. I don’t feel calm and can’t agree with what I’m listening to, so I subconsciously reject it. In a strange way, I find that listening to angry music calms me down, or at least I don’t hate the music and the situation. When I am upset and listen to harsh music, like hard rock or mathematica, I find myself able to concentrate more on the music and less on what’s pissing me off.

Typically I need my music to help me concentrate or work, so I’m looking for music that fits that part of my life. So far, I don’t know if there’s anything better than Explosions In The Sky, specifically the album “The Earth Is Not A Cold, Dead Place,” but the search continues. It’s a search that is its own reward.

John is Steve and Merlin is Frank ok there i said it.