Coffee Making

Good coffee is enjoyable to drink black.  Poor coffee needs cream and sugar to kill the bad taste.  One secret to good coffee is a scrupulously clean coffee maker.  An oily residue settles out of brewed coffee and then turns rancid, giving a nasty flavor to the next pot of coffee until it gets washed away in hot soapy water.  Some coffee makers, percolators especially, have interior nooks and crannies that are impossible to clean, short of wrecking the thing.  Whereas the French press is the most easily cleaned coffee maker out there.  The old all glass vacuum Silex was OK providing you had a long thin brush to clean the inside of the suction tube to the upper bowl.   The all glass Chemex with the paper filters is OK.  I don't trust the plastic Mr. Coffee machines, I think the plastic takes up the rancid taste of coffee oils.  For myself I have been using a small two cup French press I got from LaHoutes camping supply store. 
    I get excellent results buying plain ground canned coffee.  The $3 a can Shurfine Columbian makes as good a cup of coffee as the $10 a can Dunkin Donuts and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.  I keep the coffee can in the refrigerator to reduce evaporation of the coffee essences.   
   My rural water supply system has gone ape on chlorine lately, the tap water can smell like a swimming pool.  I  let my coffee water stand in a pitcher on the kitchen table overnight.  Improves everything. 
   I put two rounded tablespoons of coffee and a shake of the salt cellar into the French press. The salt smooths out the flavor and takes the edge off the bitterness.   Fill it up with boiling water and let it brew four minutes. 
   Good coffee, drinkable black.

Windows 8 does its own thing, Touchpad

In order to make a laptop usable, you need to disable the touchpad while typing.  Your typing hands hover over the touchpad, and the damn pad sees light finger brushes as solid mouse clicks. Each time that happens, bad things happen to your text, random cursor moves, weird escape sequences inserted in your text, or whole pages of text just gone.   I use a plain jane USB mouse,  the kind with real mechanical buttons that click when pressed.  So I have no need of the touch pad, in fact it messes up my typing. 
    So, off to Windows 8 configuration land.  Stroke your finger from the right hand screen edge toward screen center, and a mystery menu pops up.  Click on "Settings" (bottom gear wheel icon).  Click on "Control Panel".  Sort thru the hundred or so icons in ControlPanel and click on "Mouse".  Inside the "Mouse" program, click on "Touchpad" tab.  Check "Disable internal pointing device when USB mouse is present".  
   Make a record of how you did this.  Windows 8 will occasionally clear the checkmark and your typing goes to pieces again.  When that happens, repeat the whole procedure, and the problem will go away again, at least until Windows 8 decides to liven up your life.
   It ought to be a felony to release software this flaky, but heh, if you are Micro$oft, anything goes.

American Cops need flack jackets

Baltimore, Ferguson, New York City, all have demonstrated deep seated hatred for the police among the population.  And taking pot shots at the Dallas cops last week is hardly an advertisement for good police community relations.  And yet, we need the police to protect us from the small number of ruthless criminals among us.  Here is my list of things the cops ought to be doing to set things right.
1.  Hire locally.  Cops on a municipal force ought to be long time residents of the city.  Long time means they attended elementary school and high school in the town.  This gets you cops with some local roots, some local connections, who can reach out to old childhood friends in the community for tips and intelligence.
2.  Get out of the squad car, and talk to people.  Find out what's going down, who is who.  Assign the same cops to the same neighborhoods day after day, to give 'em a chance to get to know people.  Cases are solved by tips, and you need connections to get tips. 
3.  Police uniforms should be blue, not black.  Only bad guys wear black. 
4.  Stop harassing innocent citizens and enforcing petty laws.  Texas cops just busted a pair of seven year old girls for running a lemonade stand.  Eric Garner died in New York when arrested for selling single cigarettes.  Stop grabbing kids off the street just cause their parents let them out of doors for a few minutes.  Legislatures and municipal governments ought repeal  petty laws. 
5.   Organize and support youth activities,  little league, youth soccer, scouting, after school activities, what ever.  In addition to keeping kids busy after school, and hence out of trouble, it gives an opportunity to build relationships with kids.  Kids grow up and turn into adult members of the community remarkably quickly. 
6.  Talk before you shoot.  Call for backup.  Remember the citizens hate it when one of their own is shot down by a cop.  American cops kill more citizens than the cops anywhere else in the world.
7.  Legalize pot.  Nearly everyone smokes it now, it is not a violent crime, and busting people for smoking or possession of reasonable amounts is counter productive.  It produces a life long bad attitude, makes the victim practically unemployable for the rest of his life, and fills expensive jail cells with non dangerous people.  Legislatures take note.
8.  Stop doing no-knock raids.  Doing one can be a death sentence for someone.  If the suspect has a gun, not unlikely, they will always open fire when they hear their door busting down.  The cops will always shoot back.  Mostly the suspect gets killed, occasionally the suspect can take a cop or two with him.  But starting a gunfight in a citizen's home at zero dark thirty is not constitutional law enforcement. 

EPA gets airborne

The EPA just claimed jurisdiction over the world's airlines.  They are gonna publish regulations on aircraft emissions.  Not that this will reduce emissions, it will just serve as a tax on air travel. 
   The best engineers in the world have been working flat out for 100 years to make aircraft more efficient.  They have had some success, new airliners with the latest engines are a tad more fuel efficient than ones built 10 years ago.  Boeing and Airbus salesmen claim as much as 20%, most people will allow them 5%.  That's enough for the airlines to order new planes and mothball what they are flying now.  Boeing has a backlog of 900 orders for its latest 787 model.  And nearly as many for its re engined 737 MAX.  Airbus is doing likewise.  In short, the most fuel efficient possible airliners are in full production and going into service as fast as they roll off the production line. 
   With jet fuel at $2.50 a gallon the airlines have all the incentive necessary to conserve fuel as much as possible.  The air frame builders have every incentive to improve fuel burn, namely,  planes that burn less fuel have better range and can haul bigger loads. 
   In a nutshell, market forces have made air travel as fuel efficient as possible.  EPA regulation won't improve anything, it will serve in place of a tax.  In the depths of Great Depression 2.0, we don't need more taxes. 

So what happened in Congress today?

The real issue is passage of the Trans Pacific Trade Agreement, an agreement with 12 Asian Pacific countries, but NOT China.  Exact contents of this deal are secret, but presumably there will be tariff reduction on all sides.  I've heard there might be a lot of other stuff too, like immigration policy, standards for inspection of this that and the other (food, drugs, who knows what), gun control, and anything else that strikes Obama's fancy. 
   However the "world's greatest deliberative body" cannot just do an up or down vote on the trade deal.  First they have to vote to have an up or down vote, "fast track authority" it's called.  Without "fast track" the bill is doomed, every one hoss congress critter will amend it, and the other 12 participants won't accept US amendments.  Usually the Congress votes to extend "fast track authority" to the President as a matter of course.  Except Obama has ruffled so many feathers on capitol hill that they won't vote him hardly anything anymore. 
   Then, today a new boondoggle surfaced, "Trade Adjustment Agreement" (TAA) or some such.  This is a presidential slush fund to "compensate" (pay off) US workers who loose their jobs because of foreign competition, which a tariff cut will strengthen. 
   They had a vote today, but it is unclear what passed and what did not.  I think the TAA was voted down and "fast track" was voted in, but the TV newsies haven't been very clear about what really happened.  Bret Baier was on Fox calling it a big defeat for Obama.  The president's mouthpiece was saying everything is hunky dory.  On this one I think I believe Bret Baier over the mouthpiece. 
Would be nice to get a straight story out of the newsies. 

Cooking for one, Corn on the Cob

Good easy way to cook corn on the cob.  Buy your corn in the husk.  Soak corn in water for 10-15 minutes, long enough to get the husk good and moist.  Then pop the corn in the oven or on the grill for 35-45 minutes.  The kernels steam in the husk and come out exceptionally sweet. With butter and salt  it's delicious.
   This works for a single ear, or a dozen ears. 

Electronic Health Records hacked

This morning's NPR had a story concerning analysis of thousands of electronic health records to come to a conclusion that some widely used drug wasn't good for patients.  Can't remember what the drug's name was, nor how serious the problem was.
  The disturbing part about this, is giving outside snoopers access to my medical records.  My medical records are supposed to be private.  Medical records often contain derogatory information, like mental health problems, AIDS, chronic illnesses that make a person unemployable.  To have "researchers" going thru personal health records is bad.  To be fair, the NPR piece claimed that names had be redacted.  Yeah, Right. 
   Obamacare demands the all doctor's put all patient's medical records into computers (electronic health records) where they can be hacked and snooped.