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I bought a Rancilio Silvia espresso machine about 5 years ago and have been slowly modifying my technique to make a latte. This is a great machine that can produce a very high quality shot and has enough power to make good quality micro-foam as well. It has only one drawbacks as far as I can tell; it only has one heat exchanger so you can’t pull shots and steam milk at the same time. However, for this price you won’t find a good machine with two heat exchangers. Unlike the full automatics, the Silvia lets you have lots of control over the quality of the coffee.

So here’s my technique – derived from many others I’ve read about out on the net and lots of experimentation and discussion with others. I think I’ve probably made at least 1500 drinks with my machine, and have constantly fine tuned my technique over the years.

Along with a Silvia, you need a coffee grinder. I have a Rancilio Rocky doserless model. The doserless model allows you to just grind the coffee you need for the shots you are making so you have very fresh grounds. You will also need a steam pitcher, a latte sized coffee cup (probably about 6-8 ounces), and a tamp. And of course, get some really good coffee. I’ve been drinking Coffee Ambassador’s Guatemalan Huehuetenango for the last few years. This year’s crop is quite good.

A Silvia has a power switch and three action switches – one for activating the pump for brewing, one for activating the pump for water out the steam wand, and one for steam. It has one light that indicates when the heat element is turned on.

A Latte Art Rosetta

1. Turn on the machine. Warmup is essential, and I usually try to give it at least a 1/2 hour before making coffee.
2. When the machine is warmed up and the heater light is off, place the empty portafilter in the machine and place your cup under the portafilter and turn on the brew switch. Your cup will fill with hot water. When the heater light turns on, immediately turn off the brew switch and leave the water in the cup.
3. Remove the portafilter from the machine, pour out any excess water in the cup and immediately grind your coffee into the portafilter.
4. When your portafilter is full of grounds, run your finger along the portafilter even with the top. Do this in two swipes, perpendicular to one another, ensuring the coffee is as level as possible in the portafilter. It should come up to the top.
5. Now, you need to tamp it. I usually tamp once with about 30 pounds of pressure, turn the tamp over and use the handle to gently knock the side of the portafilter to knock any grounds off the side. Then, I tamp once more and do a quick spin or two lightly to knock any grounds off the tamp.
6. While grinding and tamping the coffee, the Silvia is heating up. If you time it just right, you will be ready to put the portafilter in just as the heat light goes off. Now, turn on the steam switch, insert the portfilter into the brew head, place the cup under the portafilter and then turn on the brew switch. It is important to turn on the steam switch first – this causes your machine to immediately turn on the heater and keeps the water temperature high while the shot is being pulled. It also ensures you have the quickest turnaround possible when you steam milk. The longer your shot sits there waiting for you to steam milk, the more flavor it loses. From the time the pump is turned on to the time your shot is complete should be about 25 seconds. Getting this right is really a fine art, and there is a lot of information available, such as the CoffeeKid mini FAQ.
7. Once the shot is complete, you should turn off the pump, remove the portafilter, eject your espresso puck (great for your compost pile!), and run the water switch for a few seconds to clean the brewhead. Then open the steam valve for a few seconds to clear the water from the boiler and allow some steam to build up for about 20-30 seconds. I let the hot water go into my steam pitcher, then rinse it in cold water so it doesn’t warm the milk in the next step.
8. While the machine is building steam, pour your milk in the cold frothing pitcher and let a tiny bit of steam escape from the steam wand before inserting it into the milk. Frothing is also a fine art, and takes much practice. You want the foam to be as fine as possible, with no big bubbles. I used to use a thermometer, but now just use my hand to measure temperature. When I can no longer tolerate holding a finger to the bottom of the pitcher, then I know it’s done. I alternate two fingers touching the bottom and when I can’t hold one for a full second it’s hot enough. I start with the wand all the way in the pitcher, then move it to the top until it just slurps, then move it just a bit below the surface. The key is to get very good rotation of the milk in the pitcher, so it is best to aim the wand so the steam pushes the milk along the side of the pitcher. If the Silvia has enough steam built up, this will take about 20-30 seconds.
9. Last comes the pour. Swirl the milk in the pitcher to help release any larger bubbles. It also is good to tap the pitcher on the counter a few times between swirls. Now pour the milk out into the mug. This is where you can do some latte art, which is another entire subject. Sit down and enjoy!

This entire process might seem a bit crazy. But once you have some practice and a good rhythm, you can do this (minus warmup time) in less than five minutes. In fact, I have used this method to make a nice latte every morning for years. When you consider that a Starbucks latte would cost me about 4 clams each plus time standing in line downtown, I’m sure doing this myself is thousands of dollars cheaper and I think the quality is far better. Finally, I think the ritual of making the drink adds to the experience, and it’s even better when you can share drinks with others.

I had the girls just to myself for the weekend with Laura gone for a few nights. We hit the choo choo in Des Plaines for lunch on Saturday. Nothing’s better than getting your lunch delivered on an electric train.

They just don’t make restaurants like this anymore.

The girls at the Choo Choo

Words that my 15 month, Lily, uses in ‘conversation’, in chronological order:

• Dada (of course)
• Mama
• Baby
• Bye-bye
• Kitty
• Audrey (pronounced adi, her sister)
• Woof-woof
• Night-night
• Cookie
• Bubbles
• Nana (banana)
• Elmo (Sometimes pronounced Elmot)
• Shoes
• Apple
• Moo
• Bobby (Belly)
• Bott (belly button)
• Cow
• Ducky
• No no no
• Doggy
• Poopoo
• Pumpkin
• Fish
• Grandpa
• Nose
• Owl
• Ernie
• Bath
• Blanket
• Yes
• Nice
• Butterfly
• Meat
• Applesauce
• Coffee
• All done, all gone
• Coat
• Toast
• Potty
• Bag
• Airplane
• Oval
• Heart
• Tractor
• Diaper

I was a happy user of Quicken on the PC years ago, and after moving to Mac was very unhappy with Intuit’s Mac offerings.  I briefly used iBank but was pretty unhappy with the limited feature set.  The reporting and graphing was very basic, and there was not automated integration with banks and brokerage firms.  I think this is changing in newer versions, but I gave up on waiting for this feature.  I switched to Quicken on the Mac, but found the product to be absolutely horrible.  Most Mac apps have a well thought out user interface, and usability is a primary concern.  Not so with Quicken.   The Mac version is much harder to use than the PC version, and costs more to boot.  I limped along on it for a year, before discovering mint.  Mint.com, even in its earlier stages, was a joy to use.  It had a simple interface and nice basic reports.  It gave you the high level information you needed to track your spending without forcing you through 500 required fields like Quicken does.  And the latest update is even better, with more flexible budgeting tools and better reporting.

And now this: I saw the bad news this morning, Mint.com was selling out to Intuit. You have to read the comments, it seems like half of the people are really upset.  I really hope this ends well, but it’s hard to say.  I think it will be very hard for the Mint team to move over to Intuit and keep innovating.   Quicken has their own online version,  but obviously it must suck or they wouldn’t spend $170M to buy another company.  I imagine this experience will be a little bit like the past 15 bank mergers I have had the privilege of living through.

Some Mint users are deleting their accounts immediately.   I think I might want to stick things out for a while and hope for the best.

I picked up a copy of John Hodgman’s “More Infromation Than You Require” a few months back when I saw that a signed 1st edition was available from Powell’s (only one left at the time of writing!).

John Hodgman Autograph

I have always enjoyed John’s appearances on “The Daily Show”, and as PC in the Apple commercials.  After reading this book, I can say he is quite a strange man with a very good imagination.  The book is a rambling continuation of his first book, “The Areas Of My Expertise”, which I haven’t read, but from what I can tell from the many references in “More Information Than You Require”  is very similar. This book is quite funny.  I read part of it on the train, and more than once cracked up laughing, probably causing my fellow passengers to wonder about me.

The book is broken down into several sections, such as “The Presidents of the United States: Are they the new hoboes?”, and “How to be famous”.  He also has a section where he offers advice on a number of issues, including technology and protecting yourself from identity theft that is hilarious.

The book is laid out in a reference book format.  Each page, including the title page, contains a little fact from a date in history, starting with October 21 – the date the book is published.  The facts have no relation to the rest of the content, so you end up having to switch contexts on every page, which can be quite annoying, but some of them are pretty funny.  There are also a number of tables, sidebars, and strange pictures to support the content.  Hodgman has managed to do many other creative things with the book.  For example, the page numbering starts at 237, a continuation from his previous book.

After a few hundred pages of random “facts” and humor, there is a large section of the book devoted to describing mole-men (some sort of human that lives underground) and their interactions with humans throughout recent history.  In this section, Hodgman lists 700 mole-man names (ex. 611. Mr Drew Danglemites, a gem swallower).   I think the mole-men chapter was about the time when I just wanted to finish the book.

If you’re a John Hodgman fan, I highly recommend this book.  It’s filled with his unique sense of humor, and is a good change of pace for you to add to your reading list.

I had blogged a few months back about how I got a survey from ESPN about ESPN360, their online video presence.  I checked on their web site a few weeks ago and saw that they have reached an agreement to offer ESPN-U and ESPN360 to Comcast customers.  Apparently this is old news, but I’m pretty happy to see this.  Maybe that will mean getting a few more NU games when they are on the road.  It seems like there are fewer Big 10 games on regular TV now than when I was in high school.

I got this email today, and thought it was pretty funny. I hadn’t yet read the actual article, and it turns out in context it’s not quite as funny, but this cracked me up a bit.

Oops, I guess that was the wrong theology

Well, my paphiopedilum is in bloom. Pretty exciting, this is the second orchid that has bloomed since I took custody of a nice collection from a friend.

paphiopedilum in bloom

In my quest to get back on the GTD wagon, I decided to spring for a copy of OmniFocus for both the Mac and the iPhone.   One neat feature is the ability of the app to use WebDAV to store the database on a web server and then sync between the two versions remotely.  I will probably always have my phone with me when I am using my laptop, so I don’t know how critical this feature will be for me.  However it does provide for a remote backup of the data, plus allows me to pull the data down when I want it instead of having to remember to sync “one more thing” on the phone before heading out the door.  You can use a MobileMe account to do this, but since I’m a cheapskate I had to figure out how to do this with the servers I already pay for.  A quick google search showed some nice blog posts on getting this setup using Mac OS X Leopard, but I wanted to run this on my Ubuntu server. So here’s basically what’s needed. First, make sure you have apache2 installed. I won’t cover that here. You need to enable mod_dav and mod_dav_fs.

sudo /usr/sbin/a2enmod dav
sudo /usr/sbin/a2enmod dav_fs


I also wanted ssl enabled so I wasn’t sending credentials in the clear. Turns out that the ssl certificate script (apache2-ssl-certificate) that most tutorials mention is not included with apache anymore. But you can do basically the same with the ssl-cert package, so install that as well as openssl if it’s not installed already. One problem is the cert is only good for one month, so if ignoring the warning you get from OmniFocus bothers you, you can fix that later by generating a cert with a longer expiration, or getting a real one.

sudo aptitude install openssl
sudo aptitude install ssl-cert


This should create a certificate and put it in /etc/ssl/private/localhost.pem. Then enable the ssl module and the ssl configuration on apache.

sudo a2ensite ssl
sudo a2enmod ssl


Then, create an htpasswd file that will be used to authenticate for your directory. I put mine in /etc/apache2.


sudo htpasswd -cs webdav.passwd username

Then follow the prompts.

You need to setup your config for the ssl part of your server, it will be in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled.   You need to pick a location on your server to host the data.   Whereever you put it, make sure it’s owned by the user that apache runs as:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data data/


Here’s a sample config:

<VirtualHost *:443>
SSLEngine On
SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/private/localhost.pem
Alias /data "/opt/data/"
<Directory "/opt/data">
Dav On
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
AuthType Basic
AuthName WebDAV-Realm
AuthUserFile "/etc/apache2/webdav.passwd"
require valid-user
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Just restart your server and hopefully everything is setup.

sudo apache2ctl graceful

You can check it from a browser by navigating to https://yourdomain.com/data, assuming no other apache strangeness has been configured.

I received a new credit card and ATM card in the last few weeks as my old ones had expired.  In the past, when I needed to activate them I was able to just do this via an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system in about 15 seconds.  Done and done!  This time, for the credit card I was connected with a live person who proceeded to tell me all about a credit monitoring service that I should use.  I managed to talk my way out of that one, but for the ATM card I was forced to listen to an automated message for the same service.  It must have droned on for about a full minute, and then when I didn’t press “1″ to buy the service, it said something to the effect of “while you are waiting for us to activate your card, don’t miss this great opportunity, blah, blah”.  Do they really think we don’t know how long it takes to activate a card?  I guess they have to make up their billions of losses somewhere…