Whisky: Johnnie Walker Scotch

The smell of it, the color, the taste and ... the feeling. Isn't Whisky awesome? Here is a short research result on it.
My favorites are Johnnie Walker (Scotch), Crown royal (Canadian), and Jack Daniel's (Tennessee).

Johnnie Walker is just mesmerizing and my favorite of all. I have mostly drunk the red label (the world's most popular whisky), the cheaper of the three labels: Red, Black and Blue. Still I have been quite happy with it. At this moment, our liquor store sells a 750 ml bottle of Red label for $29, Black label for $48, and Blue label for $220. Detailed descriptions are here. There are also some more recent labels: Green (15 year old, $66) and Gold (18 year old, $85)

Whisky is actually a broad range of alcoholic beverages with 4 main types, more on this here. It also explains the two different spellings of Whisky versus Whiskey.

Coffee! The greatest antioxidant

I am always confused entering Blenz, Starbucks, etc. There are so many different types, roasts, and brands. It is also as confusing when I am choosing coffee for my own coffee maker. Here are some interesting simple facts to have in mind.

There are two main types of coffee. The most common ones are Coffea arabica being the most espensive one and the other robusta. "Other species include Coffea liberica and Coffea esliaca, believed to be indigenous to Liberia and southern Sudan respectively."
Coffee roasting can be classified under 4 categories for darkness: Light (e.g. Cinnamon roast), medium (e.g. American, preferred in North America), dark (e.g. French) and darkest (e.g. Italian).

Coffee can be prepared in a number of different styles. Coffee makers requires drip fine grind coffee. Espresso need very fine grind (uniform tiny particles). Coffee press or French press, in the contrary, needs large particles. This is where a good grinder stands out from a cheaper one.

This article describes with illustrations how to prepare coffee using a press pot. And see how espresso machines work.

Starbucks defines 4 main elements contributing to brewing a great coffee as Proportion, Grind, Water and Freshness.

• Proportion: " two tablespoons of ground coffee (10 grams) for each six fluid ounces (180 milliliters) of water" then adjusted to the tast.
• Grind: "The shorter the brewing process, the finer the grind ... for instance, coffee ground for an espresso machine should be very fine, in part because the brew cycle is only 19 to 22 seconds long. But for a coffee press, the coffee should be coarse ground."
• Water: "Use fresh, cold water heated to just off the boil."
  
• Freshness: "The enemies of coffee are oxygen, light, heat, and moisture." So keep the ground coffee for a short time in "opaque, airtight container at room temperature," And the original box, air tight in the fridge.

Canada's Food guide

This is a brief but sweat guide for healthy living, covering basic concepts for proper eating and exercise.

• Food guide in pdf

• The main website

GnuPG and email encryption

There is a free package GnuPG that is installed on a computer and provides encryption and electronic signature in general and for email. There are costume plugins for most common email clients (Eudora, outlook, ...), for Thunderbird you need to install a sort of under development Mozilla extension, Enigmail.

Just download GnuPG, check its integrity by using sha1deep for checksums, and then install it. Then download the Mozilla extension and install it to Thunderbird. A new menu item will appear as OpenPGP.

OpenPGP will run you through a wizard the first time you use it. You need to input a pass phrase that protects your private key while the public key is shared with the recipient. It works perfectly fine and can be set to sign or encrypt per request or automatically.

The problem is that the recipient should have similar package installed in order to decrypt the code to see your email and/or verify your signature.

Links:

1. Thunderbird FAQ
2. Enigmail extension
3. GnuPG (download, windows FTP (SHA1: b34cb9678550d2acd5e988bc2ba9b20bfe361027))
   

Mandriva it is!

It is ironic that just when Vista is here, I am thinking of going back to Linux at least as a second operating system. I love XP and am going to use it as my prime OS, since it is very versatile and supports 3 softwares I primarily use and are only available for Windows. I am going to get Vista for free as an upgrade soon too.

I am a regular Solaris users, but since 3 years ago where I stopped doing system administrative part time work, I have been using Linux only occasionally.

I have been researching to what Linux to pick: OpenSuse, Mandirva, Redhat or Debian. I have used Redhat quite a lot and also Debain but as a compute server not a as desktop. After reading here and there I decided to go with OpenSuse or Mandriva. My first pick was SUSE but I run into many problems. I had to download it a few times the md5deep checksums were not matching. Finally I had the Opensuse live DVD as well as the x-86-64 images, but neither worked well. I get kernel panics every time. I seriously wasted too much time on it so concurrently I gave Mandriva a test. I tried Mandirva one first, as it is both live and install. It worked perfectly and got all my devices on my AMD Turion 64 X2 recognized. I then downloaded the 2007 DVD and boom installed easily on a external harddrive (I didn't want to mess with my NTFS windows drive and so boot loader was a problem if I wanted to install it on a partition of the main hard drive).
I am loving it very much: installation was a breeze, system is stable, lots of free softwares and games

AND

With the pre-installed 3D desktop, ..... boy oh boy when I get my Vista in a few weeks I don't think it is going to be a wow (as advertised by MS) to me anymore, no matter how well is the eye candies. (I am more of practicality and not into eye candy but if both are combined, why not).

However, I could not get drak3d to work on my laptop, as it complains that it doesn't have required hardware! It is a premium ready machine, why ...