On prompt engineering

Once colleges start teaching Prompt Engineering (are they already?), will they finally merge Humanities studies with engineering?

My blog was down for the better part of the evening due to excessive MySQL logs and expired cached media filling up the entire 50 GB hard disk with noise.

Now freed up 55% and all my sites are back online. What a way to spend a Friday evening.

Replaced the Apollo app on my phone with Instapaper

I’ve been addicted to Apollo for most of this year. The way people doomscroll Instagram and Twitter, I do Apollo. Mind you, it’s not Reddit, but Apollo, that I use. Reddit just happens to be the backend for this app in addicted to.

Therefore, now that Reddit has gone and killed off third party apps like Apollo, I’ve moved that app into a folder and replaced it with Instapaper. Since I’ve been spending so much time in Apollo, I’ve got a long of Read Later catching up to do.

I intend to move my RSS feed reader of choice – Fiery Feeds – to that spot at some point. I like catching up on what’s going on in my subscribed feeds.

But post-Apollo, I realized that much like on other addictive social networks, it’s the anticipation of what the next post will bring, that is the most addictive component. It’s not so much the emotions themselves that keep us hooked, but the rollercoaster of guessing what the next post will bring – will it be happy, sad, upsetting, or delightful? No matter how much I control my RSS feeds and my news apps, these will fundamentally still have that same “feature” – I can’t know what the next post will be about. I can only guess and that guessing game is addictive.

In contrast, Instapaper is largely under my control. I feed into it manually (except for a few automated emails that go into it – Airmail and LitHub). Therefore, I know what’s in it. The lack of anticipation is good.

It’s another form of slow living – trying to control what you consume on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis. Perhaps it’ll be good for me.

Otherwise, I’ll jump back on the bandwagon on some social network. Just not Apollo.

I can read non-fiction!

I think I’ve figured out what type of non-fiction I enjoy.

It’s called a biography memoir. The idea is that it has to be a collection of memoirs of multiple people, and it shouldn’t be an autobiography. I can’t deal with that. It has to be written by someone else.

Not just that, though. I think I prefer feminist biography memoirs.

The latest one I’ve read is The Baby on the Fire Escape by Julie Phillips. I just finished the audiobook last night and will be working tonight through the bookmarks I’ve made. I have the physical copy of the book and I borrowed the audiobook from Seattle Public Library. So I’ll transport the bookmarks to my copy before I relinquish the library loan.

Before this, I read Figuring by Maria Popova. It’s quite a tome and again, I own the physical copy, but it was infinitely easier to work through the public library audiobook instead.

I believe my love for biography memoirs started with Poland by James Michener and solidified over War and Peace. They’re both fiction, but written in a very matter-of-fact, almost-non-fiction style. Then, A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf turned me on to feminist writing. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon turned me away from men writing about women characters. Pynchon’s an idiot.

I know most of the titles I’ve listed above are pure fiction or semi-autobiographical. But I’ve never confessed a love for non-fiction writing. So it’s a big deal for me to recognize that there is some non-fic that’s palatable to me.

In conclusion, while I’ll continue to enjoy fiction all my life, feminist biography memoirs will be what I’ll pick up when I want to read about real people’s lives.

Quick Read: Write Less

Fewer words are fine. Social-length posts are fine. Link blogs are fine. You get to keep your own output, where you want it, and the form it takes is entirely up to you.

You only need to give yourself permission.

Write Less, by Matt Gemmell

This makes so much sense to me!

This is what digital gardens and second brains are all about – quick notes that coalesce into something greater, because you keep going back to the tool over and over, thinking through it instead of on it, or outside of it.

Goes well with my post about how you shouldn’t Moleskin your blog.

via Colin Walker

Coffee Notes – Milk

Well, this one isn’t about coffee. To be precise, it’s not about a specific coffee (pod), but all coffee.

Well, most coffee. I know some of you don’t put milk in your coffee. Some don’t even put sugar! Heck, some don’t even put water. But I do.

I put milk. Specifically, cool milk with foam. I don’t like it warm or hot or lukewarm. When I get a café latte from the local French coffee shop, I tend to wait for the coffee to cool down before I enjoy it.

The setting on my Nespresso for milk is – don’t change the temperature, but make it frothy AF.

I recently changed that. The seasons are a changing. I got influenced by that and decided to up the milk temperature to “normal”. I’ve also been experimenting with reducing the sugar I ingest with my coffee. It’s not a lot – one spoon. But I removed that too recently.

The result? Disaster. When my milk was fridge temperature, the coffee was good, tasty, sweet even!

But as soon as I set it to normal, the final result is kadwa! Sorry, bitter (kadwa is bitter in Hindi). It became so bitter!

So here’s my question for all you coffee drinkers – is your hot coffee bitter without sugar? Why?? This isn’t an acquired taste situation, which you must get used to in order to enjoy something. Alcohol, caviar, spicy food, blue cheese, natto come to mind. There are ways to mitigate their tastes too, but they’re largely enjoyed exactly as they’re meant to be, so it makes sense to acquire those tastes.

But coffee comes in so many forms! Why would you suffer through the bitterness if you’re having hot coffee?

End of rant. I’m now going to go change the temperature back to what’s normal for me.

Have a good hump day!

Request for some Photo Blogs

I love reading RSS feeds. But sometimes words get tiring. Today is one of those days.

Luckily, I have a folder with a few very nice photo blogs that I fall into when I’m in such a phase.

I’ve got the following blogs on there –

@muan’s photos – This has got to be one of my favorite photo blogs. The aesthetic is decidedly Instagrammy-personal. It’s a very direct peek into what Mu-An Chiou, a software engineer living in Taiwan, sees around her. She posts her pics as stories using the Open-Stories format and has an added layer of what is called the Open Heart protocol. It lets me hit the little heart button from within the RSS feed. That’s so cool! Of course, if you’re on her site, you can hit the little heart icon on her pics there. I love this setup much more than the horrible implementation by WordPress, so I hope someone takes the time to port this over so I can use it one day.

Manuel Moreale Instagram Style RSS Feed – Manuel is a software dev in Italy. I love that he calls his photo RSS feed “Instagram style”. I don’t know if he posts the same to Instagram, but it’s interesting to see how that social network has influenced the way we think about photography. I loved the recent trip Manuel made to Umbria. He posted a link to an iCloud album and it’s gorgeous! In his own words (via email to me) – “But that’s Italy for you. There’s just too much to see.”

There are a few others in the list who are MIA – Don’t Take Pictures, Licht Years. Would be cool if these blogs get revived at some point.

Through Mu-An, I recently discovered the Bring Back Blog directory and I’m slowly searching for and adding feeds that include photography (and some that don’t) to my feed reader.

But I’d love to hear from you, dear reader – any blogs you’d recommend that I follow? I hold dearest personal, “day in the life” photography. But I also love landscape photography that showcases the great outdoors and adventures of hiking and camping.

BTW, one of the things I miss the most is a short-lived project called bwrss by Giles Turnbull, which was black and white photography, delivered exclusively through the RSS feed and not visible anywhere else on the Internet. Giles, if you’re reading this, maybe bring it back? kthxbye.

Coffee Notes – Ispirazione Firenze

Ah, now this was real coffee! One shot of this in the afternoon and I was awake much later than I wanted to! 😀

After the previous Coffee Notes post, I got some really nice responses, mainly from the micro.blog community. There are a lot of discerning coffee drinkers out there and @Jean MacDonald, who is the Community manager at Micro.blog, linked me to a very nice table of the caffeine content in each of the Nespresso coffee pods. (future goal – try the Palermo Kazaar one evening and see what that does to my sleep cycle!)

The Nespresso Ispirazione Firenze

So now I know that the previous coffee I had, the Livanto, had sixty four mg of caffeine per shot, while this new one, the Firenze, has only sixty three mg. However, it’s much more intense, at a nine out of thirteen.

That means a lot more kick, for sure! I experienced as much when I sipped my first cup. This coffee makes a nice amount of crema on top of the coffee and sits in the just dark enough on the dark roast scale to be exceptional.
Plus, the look is so royal! I love the purple of the pods. It gave a nice shine when I went to stand at my coffee workstation and it was a joy to pick up just one pod for my afternoon coffee.

I suppose it’s a (good) consequence of it being that much darker, that I can consume less of it.

I would say that I was pleasantly surprised by the combination of good taste and nice looks, but I sort of expected that when I pulled these out of the pack. However, it’s not all perfection. One of the pods failed to pierce properly and that resulted in plain (though a little dirty from my machine’s internals) water pouring out to my cup. I already had two spoons of sugar down there and I could see them quickly dissolving into the hot water.

Did I toss that water out? Nah. It just made for some watered down coffee. I liked it!

I did “discover” something. When I usually make coffee, I take the milk directly from the fridge and set it to froth. One time however, my mother-in-law had already heated up milk for themselves and some extra was sitting in the saucepan. I took that and poured it out, taking with it some of the cream that settles on top when hot milk cools down.

That cream made for a really super frothy milk! It coated the insides of my glass and looked very nice. This will make for a beautiful coffee experience one day, when I pour super frothy milk into a glass cup instead of the usual ceramic ones I use. I double quotes “discover” up there, because I sorta knew this beforehand, but haven’t used creamed milk in a while.

Maybe at some point in the future I’ll make it a habit to either pre-warm and cool my milk, or add some whipping cream to my milk if I want that extra froth.

Anyways, final verdict on the coffee – don’t have it after 4 pm, unless you want to be awake till 2 am! 😀

Shoutout to @pratik and @hawaiiboy over on microblog for not calling me a coffee snob.

Coffee Notes – Nespresso Livanto

It almost feels wrong to begin Coffee Notes with Nespresso pods. After all, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of amazing coffee vendors all over the internet vying for our attention. They arguably even have better, cheaper product.

But I won’t belie Nespresso the quality of their products. After all, it’s their machine that I use to brew my coffee. So they’ve got to know what works best with it, right?

Besides, I recently ordered a box set of Nespresso pods. So the first five reviews (probably, unless I get bored and order something different) are going to be of Nespresso pods. Here goes.

The Nespresso Livanto

Ah, this coffee was smooth. Too smooth! Those ten pods vanished fast. Partly because it’s a six on thirteen medium roast (point of order – Nespresso’s rating system is out of thirteen.)

The taste was rich and smooth. I didn’t bother having it black, but I reckon it would have been creamy and absolutely drinkable. But throw in milk and sugar and it was quite glorious!

Since it was a medium roast, I ended up having it two at a time for my afternoon coffees. At three pods a day, I finished the box in about three days. I had to brew a Moka pot with my Indian coffee for the fourth day, to get through the afternoon.

At almost a dollar per pod (eighty cents, to be precise), these pods are at the expensive end of the range of OriginalLine pods I buy for my machine. Though, if I had a VertuoLine machine, I’d be averaging a dollar twenty five for similar pods. I seem to remember doing that research when considering which machine to buy. My Breville Nespresso Creatista won on that aspect.

I don’t have much else to say about this coffee. It was nice. It went fast. I’d definitely order more of it and keep it for light-coffee-drinking visitors. But usually, I end up serving them decaf or whatever other medium roast I have sitting around.

I will say – I love the aluminum pods Nespresso ships. The color, the shape, the solidity of the pod, are all plus points in experience. These ones have a beautiful caramel color and I’m all for it!

Read about my Coffee Notes series in the introductory blog post here.

Coffee Notes – Introduction

white ceramic coffee cup on white saucer

In the tradition of every techie ever, I drink coffee daily. My average is about three cups a day. It used to be two cups, but then I went ahead and had a kid. So now it’s three to four cups a day.

I do not drink my coffee black. I find that my taste buds haven’t been ruined enough to enjoy black coffee. Milk and sugar is standard, though I experiment with things like caramel syrup, taro root powder, chaga mushroom powder, etc.

I drink essentially three types of coffee at home –

I own a Breville Nespresso Creatista machine and that’s my primary method of coffee intake. It takes Nespresso OriginalLine pods and spits out a coffee and steams the milk. Nespresso-compatible pods come with a rating system which seems out of 10, but the darker roast coffees are often 11 or 12. The rating system is supposed to be somewhat standardized, but I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of variance. It seems that vendors, specially fly-by-night vendors on Amazon, just do whatever suits them. I’m ok with that. I’m not looking for a consistent coffee experience. If I wanted more caffeine, I’ll just make another coffee. If I want less kick, I just add more milk and enjoy the coffee longer.
I also use an IKEA Moka pot with this awesome South Indian coffee powder my friends gifted me. It has 40% chicory and that takes the taste in a whole different direction. I love that too! The Moka pot adds it’s own flavor profile. I don’t fill it up fully and the resulting coffee is somehow more bitter than if the pot were full. I love the darkness of the coffee on days when I want a real good jolt, and on days when I can’t run the machine as my kid’s sleeping.
Lastly, I also enjoy Nestle Instant coffee, a holdover from my youth in India. This bottle is only available in Indian stores, though I’m sure grocery stores in the US carry their own type of instant coffee. The process is simple – heat up some milk, toss in some sugar, toss in some coffee powder, and mix! A variation of this is to first milk sugar and coffee powder with hot water and whip it into a fine lather. Adding milk to that reveals a whole new world of joy.

While I may talk about numbers 2 and 3 at some later point, I’m going to focus mostly on number 1 for the foreseeable future in this series. I love buying coffee pods from different vendors on Amazon and sourcing them from my local grocery store. I’ve had the machine for a while, so I’ve actually drank a lot of variety, but I’m going to start fresh, and review each pod as I’m done with a box of it.

These will not be rigorous reviews. I’m not going for critique. Rather, it’s an exploration of my own ideas around coffee. Plus, I’ve been aching to do a “series” on my blog and coffee being such a large part of our lives, it seems fitting to talk about it.

Let me know your thoughts on this in the comments section. I love to talk about coffee.