Second life

Remember me saying this the other day:

“… fire up my trusty Senseo® coffee machine which, by the way, will need to be replaced soon after many, many years of loyal service”

Well, today I found out that it may not be as bad as it looked. Better yet, my coffee machine seems to be its old self again and now only leaks just a few drops instead of say, oh, half a cup … :-) And the magic substance that fixed it all is called ‘water’. Yes, I know, that sounds very familiar and you may indeed have heard of it before.

What I did was take the thing apart as far as possible without tools (not including brute force) and let it soak in water with soap for roughly a day and a half while getting my kicks from a few cups of tea instead.

This evening I reassembled it again in a way that would have made Johnny Five proud and, voila, uncle Biek can enjoy a good cup of coffee again. My coffee machine’s second life also saves me the trouble of looking through the entire line of Senseo® coffee machines they have now and choosing a worthy successor for it.

Have a nice evening, I know I will!

Cold coffee

You ever drink your coffee hot, or warm even? Somehow I ever so often manage to let my coffee get stone cold. Or, and I’m still not sure which is worse, I even completely forget to get it from the machine.

Example: I’m behind my computer, feel the need for some more coffee, get up and fire up my trusty Senseo® coffee machine (which, by the way, will need to be replaced soon after many, many years of loyal service) and let it make me a cup of coffee. Now, instead of waiting for it to become ready, because that takes a whopping forty seconds of pure internet time, I walk back to the PC to do some more fiddling and plan on picking it up in a second or two.

I feel some of you can see where this is going …

Anyway, after half an hour or so, I ‘again’ feel like having some coffee. So I walk over to the machine only to see that last cup I made still standing underneath the machine, patiently awaiting its retrieval. Sigh …

Sometimes, however, things do go slightly better because then I actually manage to pull myself together and wait until the coffee is done, take it with me to my desk and then forget to drink it, having it go cold just the same.

I think overall that around eighty percent of my coffees get cold before I think of drinking them. Tea is a different story because that comes in a mug so because of the sheer volume you have then it takes longer to cool down. Besides, cold tea isn’t all that bad to drink anyway whereas coffee looses all its charm when it’s cold.

Have a good weekend folks, and drink it warm!

Happy New Year!

From my second home in the mountains (ok ok, so maybe not from there exactly :-) I wish you guys all the best for you and your families. I hope everyone got through the evening safely and can still remember most of it tomorrow. *grin*

Have a great two thousand and nine folks!

Define irony

I just had to share this little ‘funny, but not haha funny’ moment with you guys.

Picture this: I’m at work, fixing the PC of a colleague. It obviously is Christmas time here too so with the holidays that come with it, things are lovely quiet at the moment. The ideal timing to look into PC troubles for as far as I’m concerned, just as long as it’s a PC from work and not my own machine again. ;-)

Well anyway, he’s had some sort of Windows Update failure and now the entire Windows Update feature isn’t working anymore. It’s stuck in a loop, telling me that Windows update itself needs an update first, followed shortly by a notification that informs me that this update can’t be installed due to an unexpected error. Right. Makes you almost long for the time when errors are simply expected so you work your schedule around them, doesn’t it? :P

But with me being the optimistic guy, I’m looking into all of this, browsing website after website, forum to forum, with my close friend Google and all of a sudden this pop-up comes up in Vista:

How’s that for irony, hm? Here I was, under the impression that they had to make Windows better, so we could just get back to work … As it turns out now, they don’t even know what the problem is and are asking for our help.

I hear a discount coming up folks. *grin*

Nice Christmas

Hey folks, how was your Christmas?

Mine was pretty nice.First Christmas day I did nothing even remotely related to Christmas and basically just took the day off. Although as you may have read I did use it mainly to sleep a bit more, do the Volvo valves and just kind of hang around for the rest of the day.

Second Christmas day, however, I spend with part of the family and that was very nice. My sister, Stefan, the nieces and I were over to dad’s and Margot’s place for the afternoon. It turned out to be better than I hoped, so that was a pleasant surprise. In all honestly I’m usually not that thrilled about these larger get-togheters because somehow I tend to feel just a little bit left out, not quite sure how to explain it, that illustrious third wheel I guess. But not this time so I guess there’s hope. :-)

We all had a nice dinner together from a raclette set so each kind of cooked his and hers own food in little pans. The ingredients are a mixture of meat and vegetables which you put together to your own taste and then cook. For the nieces we also had pancake batter but us adults also had a few pancakes ourselves, they are just too good to ignore. :-) All in all I love this type of cooking. It’s great!

The way I see it, the only problem with this type of dinner/cooking is that you tend to eat way too much food. It’s all in the rhythm. Normally you prepare the whole meal up front, fill up a plate and dive in. with that twenty four hour economy in the back of our heads we empty that plate in record time and that’s that. Belly filled, we feel good, move on with our life.

With cooking from a raclette set, however, you eat in much smaller portions and in general take much, much more time for the entire dinner so you don’t feel filled up that soon, if at all. By the time you do feel it, though, you’re actually more than filled up.

These cozy Christmas dinners must be one of the main reasons people include losing weight in their new-year resolutions. ;-)