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If you need to get work done in a yard in the Bay Area, you should definitely check with Kim Dessinger at Bay Marine. Kim has been incredibly attentive to me throughout this process. When I was working on the rig he came out several times to give pointers, and when I was considering work that I would do later (on my own) he was outrageously generous with his time and experience. I’ve found that most yards take a pretty dim view of do-it-yourselfers, and though I am using a good amount of yard time, they have been more accommodating than most when I want to roll up my sleeves. Having the chance to work side by side with guys that have 25+ years of experience is a great way to fast track your education.

I just looked back through my Twitter history to see all of my past haikus and realized how much easier it would be if I just kept them on my own blog. I’ll publish the old ones here, and then create individual posts for any new ones. Enjoy, and please comment. Honeysuckle joy The purple blossoms welcome spring’s liberation #haiku 9:14 AM Mar 22nd frost bitten ear lobes deep greens and brown on cool blue ...

This is a slightly old video of Ruby singing a song she invented about respect. I love that as she’s singing it she grabs her brother and won’t let go of him when he yelps. Luckily she does let go when I ask her, so it seems as though she respects me, but not Mr. M.. Enjoy… … “This land was made for you and me.”

Soon we had our luggage and were clear of customs and the dozen or so passport checks that followed. It was time to discuss the hotel situation. At this point I believe both dad and I were panicked. Tired and overwhelmed we now had to find a place in this sprawling crawling city to rest ourselves. Dad had reviewed our guide book and highlighted a few good candidates. All of them, the guide suggested, “should be booked well in advance.” After dodging scam number one of the evening, we made our way to a “pay phone” and called the first hotel. You can imagine my shock when they told us that they had a vacancy for us. ...

The e-mail from Bentley’s Hotel came while we were still in the relative comfort of our Hong Kong hotel. The management let us know that our “Tentative Reservation” could not be filled. We would have to find another place to stay. For some reason this didn’t strike either dad or I as a particularly big deal. We spent the morning hoofing it around Hong Kong Island. When our feet started to fail us we took a bus until we were ready to walk again. Our journey led us through an amazing outdoor market, a bustling shopping district, and eventually through the Botanical Gardens. By the time we figured out how lost we were, there was nothing for it but to hail a cab and get found, and back to the hotel.

This is just too good to simply post to Facebook and retweet on Twitter. I just found out that there is a food centric counterpart to one of our family’s favorite sites, Etsy. If you’re not familiar with Etsy, its an online storefront where artists and craftspeople can sell their wares to a voratious customer base. It seems some enterprising individual has extended the concept to food, and the result looks quite scrumptious. Check out Foodzie. If you decided to buy anything, please comment on your experience.

Last night I roasted up three batches of Yemen Mokha Ismaili (highlighted in my last post). The first batch was Full City + and the second and third were roasted all the way to Vienna (all roasts were at full heat). Today when it came time to grind it up for the trip I decided to mix the FC+ and Vienna roasts together. If the smell is anything to judge by I am going to be delighted with the results. Hopefully I’ll get the licorice/cinnamon, clove flavors of the bean ( which FC+ reveals best) and the deep chocolate/caramel/earth flavors of the Vienna roast. ...

I posted my first roast report in March, right after I got my new roaster. Since then I’ve been so busy with roasting, entertaining, traveling, and life that I’ve not reported back. Well here it is. Sometime in July I convinced Vick to let me take over a portion of the laundry room for my roast shop (gotta love the smell of burnt cardboard in your clothes). I moved a bunch of stuff around and finally got the roaster semi-permanently set up next to the microwave. With the scale and barrel stand on top of the microwave everything fits nicely and I don’t have to move a bunch of part in and out of the cupboards every time I want to make a batch. This dance was occurring every 4 or 5 days so it seemed like a worthwhile compromise to our anti-clutter rule. Now the only thing I have to do when its time to roast is pull the ducting up to the hanger and crack the window a bit. ...

I’ve received a few complaints lately regarding the gallery login. If you’ve tried to log in to see the photos, and found yourself redirected to a Profile Page, you will be pleased to hear that this problem has been “fixed”. The default behavior now will be to redirect you back to the home page where you can easily click on the gallery link again. Sorry for all of the confusion. ...

As the flame of this debacle grows dim, I find myself still bothered by the misrepresentation and poor fact checking done by fellow bloggers and reporters. Case in point… A lot of people are trying to link this unfortunate episode to DRM. While I oppose DRM, and think that Amazon has squandered what little possible benefit DRM offers the consumer, this is quite clearly not at DRM issue. Digital Rights Management is concerned with access control, and specifically with limiting the ability of the consumer to copy and transmit copyrighted materials. Most people dislike DRM (possibly without know much about it) and therefore bloggers and the media have co-opted the term in hopes of raising our hackles. I post this short afterthought in hopes of settling your DRM hackles back down, at least on this count.

Hey there cherished reader, I bet you’re wondering where the photos went. How do I know, because you’ve both called me and asked, that’s how. Well here’s the scoop. I’ve migrated my blog over to wordpress. This is going to have lots of benefits for all of us, not the least of which is that my blog and photos will be much more tightly coupled now. What this means for you is that you’ll have to create a new login. Go on up to the navigation bar and click on login. Then register. You can even sign up to get e-mail notifications when new blog posts go up, how cool is that? ...

I was talking with one of my fellow Akidoists last week about how much trouble he has had raising money for the Aids Ride. We speculated that, with the downturn in economy people are giving less. I started to wonder about this (aloud of course), and kept thinking about it afterward. As Chris Guillebeau points out many times on his website, if you are reading this, you are likely very rich. You are in fact, likely to find yourself in the top 1-10% of the worlds richest people. Regardless of how you feel about economic equity it is more likely than not that you’ll agree that we at the peak of the wealth pyramid are standing atop a wide base. That base supports us in ways that I can scarcely comprehend, but in many ways it needs our support as well. ...

Last night after the kids went to bed Vick whipped up a batch of Oreo analogs that are so good that they may simultaneously cure cancer and bring peace to the world. Since words can not describe their splendor, I’m attaching a photo. If you’re in the US, I recommend stopping by.

“If a man must be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most. A small sailing craft is not only beautiful, it is seductive and full of strange promise and the hint of trouble.” E. B. White, The Sea and the Wind that Blows 1077