Mike McCracken

On this tiny UMPC I’ve been using, when windows has decided it’s time to let me know that it isn’t connected to a wireless network (I haven’t turned on the wifi card, but still, I should know it isn’t connected), the message often covers part of what I’m working on, interrupting what I’m doing until I close it or wait for it to go away.

I liken it to, say, if you’re rushing to get out of the house to go to a meeting, working to get your jacket on while getting the door open, and a wall in front of the door suddenly blocks your way to tell you that the dishwasher is done.

New-fangled: Get thing. Take thing out of box. Turn thing on. Use thing until broken. Throw thing out. Repeat.

Old-fangled: Get thing. Learn about thing. Assemble / adjust thing. Become proficient in thing maintenance. Use thing. Twiddle thing to optimize it. Repair thing / replace parts as necessary.

I care about the environment and find the disposable mindset more than a bit distasteful. Right after reduce, reuse is the priority. Then recycle. But that’s not the way consumption is done by default and those priorities can be difficult to abide by. I figure that this change has occurred from changes in economy and technology that has shifted the relative value of stuff and labor (local labor, at least). I personally hope we shift our use of material and fabrication optimizations from “more crap” to “better designed crap” and account for reuse (and reduce) in design.

Now I have a ridiculous story. I have this nice burr grinder that I got for Christmas a few years ago, but it stopped working. You know, the thing that was supposed to make it start going wasn’t making it go - but the non-electric timer mechanism was working, so I thought maybe it was just a loose wire and I might fix it. Later. A kind of half-assed nod to an old-fangled paradigm. So I stashed it away and was actually grinding my coffee with a mortar and pestle. It felt wholesome to do it that way (but I did go out for morning coffee more and eventually ground a bunch up at the parent’s place).

Wife-girl picked up on this and was very proud to get me a nice Christmas gift that she knew I needed but hadn’t asked for: a big fancy computer controlled gravity optimized mega-grinder. She put a bunch of effort into finding the most fancy-danciest one (under a kajillion bucks) and placed an order. However, not long after that I, inspired by the aforementioned wholesomeness (but un-enthused about the inconvenience), put a nice old-timey looking hand grinder on my wishlist. This was my peculiar approach to being more old-fangled without actually looking at the old grinder to fix it. Anyway, the fancy one came and after much deliberation I decided I still wanted the hand grinder (fortunately the fancy one made an excellent gift for someone else - ah, Christmas). Wife-girl managed to find it for me and I was quite happy.

So now I’m feeling good about this rustic approach to coffee grinding, which somehow makes me feel a little better on the old-fangled machine relationship front (the hand grinder is a very simple device that surely I can maintain and all that). I feel good, that is, until I try to use it for the first time. I stick some beans in it, crank away for a few seconds and just get a dusting of beans. Ok, it takes a bit longer than that, fine. I grind for a couple minutes and check to see two small piles, reflecting the curve of the burr. Wha??! I grind for ten minutes or so and make very little headway - not nearly enough to brew even a single cup.

This will not work. I’m not going to labor for nearly an hour every morning before coffee. What was I thinking with this rustic, wholesome, little house on the prairie stuff? This is miserable, how could people live like this? Before giving up all hope, I went online and found a third party manual for the machine (there wasn’t one included) and it said I should be able to grind coffee for six people in one or two minutes. That should be fine, so I read through more and it describes how I should turn this little knob to get the right grind. I follow the directions precisely. One full rotation counter clockwise, then clockwise to taste (I do about a quarter turn back). Try again, same results. Ok, it didn’t work out of the box and the internet failed me.

It is in these times of crisis that sometimes a miracle will occur - and one did this time. I actually finally engaged my brain. By looking at and listening to the burr, I adjusted the knob to a point where the grind would come out decently course for stovetop espresso. I put more beans in and plenty ground up in about a minute. Ugh, this whole time it was set so fine beans could barely make it through because it was tightened all the way up for shipping. I didn’t even check because I expected “factory settings” to be optimal. Ugh. Well, after all that stupidity (and hopefully a lesson learned) I have a nice hand grinder, and am pleased with my urban house on the prairie.

After the hand grinder idiocy, it’s time to put away the old grinder. There are no screws on it so I don’t go any further on an attempt to fix it. It’s been in use for several years and never cleaned, so I set to do that by figuring out how to take it apart. I do so and after re-assembling it I figure, heck, let’s just plug it in and try it again, eh? Why not? It works fine. The grind setting had twisted beyond it’s settings toward the position from which you take it apart, which disables it. All that fuss over wanting to be old fangled and I failed to simply twist the only adjustment on the device. Miserable. But at least I made a tiny movement forward from my way-way-way behind position in wholesome old-fangledness having gotten it working (even though it was never broken and now I have two grinders). Now I’m using the hand grinder unless I need a lot or really finely ground coffee.

You can gamble with your friends about whether or not it will load. Fun stuff - I’ll give you two to one that the page loads, but none of the CSS!

Wait, no, not any more. That is to say, server difficulties seem to be sorted out for the time being.
Now, if only I could think of something interesting to write…