Water Piping Material

Not really up for a detailed market summary, but here are a few points learnt for consideration.

• metal or polymer pipes all corrode, eventually
• metal has an solubility advantage where water is hot, but some PE/PEX materials can take hot water too
• polymer has an solubility advantage where water is softer, or has lower pH
• polymer should never be exposed to UV (i.e. try your best to keep it indoors)
• polybutene-1 has had a problem attributed to reactivity with halogen ions

I actually have been starting to think that glass piping would be an awesomely novel design choice.

Coffee Brewing vs. Water Hardness

This week, we talked to a supplier of water filters and she gave us some interesting feedback about local water conditions. She said that Klang Valley water tends to have a purity of ~70 ppm Total Dissolved Solids (TDS). Further more she said that this is with a "hardness," of "15-20," whereupon I guessed she was referring to Total Hardness (TH). She then said that this is regarded as too soft for coffee brewing, by certain customers.

I'm trying to read up on this, and have obtained some view-points, though not yet a conclusive view.

Google search term: "coffee water too soft"

This search yielded some interesting results.

(i)

Jim Schulman's Insanely Long Water FAQ. It tends to go missing, so you may have to search for it by name in the future. A choice quote:

Taste testing by various authorities over the past twenty years has established a rough agreement that neutral pH water with 90 mg/l hardness is optimal for coffee taste.

Note that the unit "mg/l," ought to be equivalent to "ppm by mass." This article has the best documented data of all the sources linked in this article. It is referred to by some of the resources below.

(ii)

The third result quotes an SCAA source, saying

As a point of reference, SCAA’s specifies* a target for TH of 150PPM with a tolerable range of 75 to 225 PPM.

and took the view, that overly-soft water (i.e. water which is too pure) makes for under-extracted coffee.

I commented my reaction:

It's interesting that you have observed water softness being positively correlated with under-extraction. (I've seen folks espousing this view, as well as its inverse.)

I'm trying to make sense of this in my head. Did you observe specifically an increase in acidity/sourness when the softness of the water increased? If so, could this simply mean that the ionic compounds responsible for acidity/sourness in fact were extracted at a *higher* rate than usual, due to the softness of the water? If so, then "under-extraction," might not be the term to use... rather, perhaps we could say "over-extraction of acidic substances?"

Just a thought.

(iii)

This article states,

Water with 20ppm (parts per million) to 120ppm of calcium is good. Calcium is essential for good extraction.

but does not say why, or based on what evidence.

(iv)

This article states,

For plain coffee, a minimum mineral content of 150-200 parts per million is essential to a good extraction. Water softer than this will result in weak and flavorless coffee. For espresso, some mineral content helps the flavor, but lots of mineral content will not help more,

but again, we're lacking in documented evidence.

(v)

This chap talks a bit about how water dissolves coffee in general, and his views on water for espresso are unquantified.

(vi)

This conversation (which makes references to this earlier conversation) takes the view that any under- or over-extraction due to water hardness or softness can be compensated for by jiggling the other parameters of brewing coffee.

Coffee + Food Pairings?

This is another blatant #lazyweb post, that basically takes top hits for the keywords off Google.

Superficial

• How to pair your coffees and foods
• Coffee Pairing
• A Perfect Pair

More depth

• 12 ways to pair your food with coffee
• Coffee Chronicles: Pairing Coffee With Food
• Coffee Pairings
• Pairing food with coffee
• Coffee Marketing: The Ultimate Food And Coffee Pairing Chart
• at Sprudge

Wine & Cheese!

• You can pair coffee with good meal and wine
• Pairing Cheese & Coffee
• An unlikely pair: Cheese paired with coffee is a buzz for your taste buds
• and apples

Now for the really fun stuff...

Chef-like people doing their thing

"Pairing Food & Coffee With Chef Victor Barry," in which men discuss certain foods to be paired with a citrusy coffee, and an earthy coffee, beautifully plated, and videographed.


"Coffee and Food Pairing," by Chef Scott and Major Cohen, in which two blokes go into a slightly more technical analysis of their rationale for pairings.


... in which Gail Hall explains "high coffee." (This is actually a better video that the caption might suggest.)

Techie talk

"Science Behind Food Pairings," goes even deeper into the technicals. Love.

Maybe...

Watch these, afterwards

"Interview: James Chatto on Pairing Coffee," a writer wades in.


"Dessert Pairing with Community Coffee Company," in which a bloke pairs coffees with desserts that... basically have the same flavour? I'm not so sure if that's a good or bad thing, myself.

Coffee + Tobacco

... in which some very confusing opinions about coffee emerge. You've been warned. This one is clearly, off-topic for third-wave coffee nerds.

Marketing? Meaning?

I've improvised around the question, "what is marketing?" This post is formatted as a magazine - it is mostly content that others have published on the Internet. I've added a recommended order of reading, and some commentary on what each piece is about. I've picked out one view from each author, and quoted it like this:

If you're skimming this article, just read all the quotes.

Some of the views below are blatantly narrow, and contradict other views below. If you're looking for an overarching summary, skip down to the "textbook," definitions. Otherwise, I begin with definitions which I hope are more accessible.

• For small businesses

  Getting someone who has a need, to know, like, and trust you.

  The Most Important System for Your Business: A Marketing System - an Interview with John Jantsch - this is a 12 minute interview. If you have 30 seconds to read a partial transcript of (quotes from) the interview, click here instead: Marketing Is Not an Event or the Idea of the Week

• Probably not-"sales"

  While marketing drives and supports sales, it is usually someone else's job to close the deal. Marketing, at its core, is about developing the strategies and tactics that support achieving an organization's goals by building relationships with prospects, customers and the public.

  What Marketing is NOT summarises Heidi Cohen's view on the matter, following her post on 72 Marketing Definitions. (Relatedly, consider these 22 Best Marketing Quotes at Forbes. The ones by Drucker are probably more useful.)

• Communication of value

  Marketing is the process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers, for the purpose of selling the product or service. It is a critical business function for attracting customers.

  Marketing, on Wikipedia.

• Marketing vs. Branding

  "Branding is strategic. Marketing is tactical."
  
  "Marketing unearths and activates buyers. Branding makes loyal customers, advocates, even evangelists out of those who buy."
  
  "Branding is as vital to the success of a business or non-profit as having financial coherence, having a vision for the future, or having quality employees."

  The Difference between Marketing and Branding by Tronvig Group, helps get one started on this oft pondered angle of the issue.

• If you do it for a living

  It goes without saying that the basic skill is marketing itself. Understanding concepts such as

  • brand equity,
  • customer lifetime value,
  • brand knowledge structure,
  • brand image,
  • and brand salience

  are essential. Equally, technical knowledge of market

  • research,
  • pricing,
  • segmentation,
  • integrated marketing communications,
  • and what metrics are applicable
    
    • under different circumstances
    • and how they are applied,

  are (or should be) a marketer's stock in trade. But there are two additional sets of skills that are now vital to the future of any marketer who has board ambitions and wishes to rank equally with executives in finance, production, and operations:

  • accounting
  • and finance.

  What Marketing Is Not by Dr. Roger Sinclair, opines that marketing is not a profession, but that it is a business function, which probably relies muchly on educated instinct and then makes some recommendations about how to approach this stuff if you wish to become a "career" marketer.
  
  (I added the bullets. Also, one could reasonably see how either education or instinct alone, would be probably insufficient.)
  

• A classic approach

  the 4 'P's:

  • product - the specific features and benefits of the product
  • place - where and how the product is sold
  • price - setting the right price in each market
  • promotion - using the most suitable form of promotion to reach customers

  Google turned that up in The Role of the Marketing Function, a broader case study of how Red Bull gets what it does, done through word-of-mouth marketing.

• A textbook definition

  This would probably be most helpful for engineers, scientists, and anyone who tends towards systematic thinking. (I'm partial to this approach, myself.)

  ... the marketing concept.
  
  "The central idea of marketing is of a matching between a company's capabilities and the wants of customers in order to achieve the objectives of both parties."
  
  The marketing concept, as opposed to the marketing function, implies that all the activities of an organization are driven by a desire to satisfy customer needs

  This unidentified Elsevier textbook then going into a detailed layout of the concepts and systems subsumed under marketing, according to its paradigm. The following seem to be supporting documents, but I haven't figured out the title/ISBN of the parent text. On The Marketing Function and an Introduction to Marketing Communications

• Another textbook definition

  Marketing consists of the strategies and tactics used to identify, create and maintain satisfying relationships with customers that result in value for both the customer and the marketer.

  Definition of Marketing in the longer tutorial on What is Marketing at KnowThis.com

Lots of people are already doing marketing or aspects of marketing, without talking about it in the same way as others. This post intends to address the problem that occurs when we use different language to talk about the same thing, and miss all of each other's points. This post may serve the secondary function of being a crash-course in marketing for pre-MBA first-time business owners.

Resources + Girls + Computer Programming?

I was poking away at some code in a coffee shop where my bosses hang out, when a femme friend came over to say hi, and later asked if I knew any resources for training women in programming computers. I know there are tons of resources out there, but you know, charitably, (insert stars and unicorns), I've assembled a short list of resources to get her started. Viva la lazy web, I suppose.

Stuff

storified SXSW discussion on scarcity

"Institutions"

blackgirlscode
Girl Develop It
Girls Who Code

Individuals

5 Girl Coders Under 21 to Watch
15 Developer/Hacker Women to Follow on Twitter - check out the six Twitter lists of MORE developers at the bottom of the article

I'm following a bunch of people on Twitter. Here are a few of those.

@geekgirlweb
@lindseybieda
@jeanqasaur
@piratefsh

I'm interested in women and technology, though not necessarily in a related fashion.

Cursory Readings on Human Rights in Malaysia

less well known:
https://www.facebook.com/CIJ.MY
http://malaysiansmustknowthetruth.blogspot.com/2012/02/suhakam-malaysia-violated-kashgaris.html


more obvious information:
http://www.hrw.org/asia/malaysia
http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2013/country-chapters/malaysia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Malaysia
http://www.unhcr.org.my/
http://malaysiasdilemma.wordpress.com/tag/universal-declaration-of-human-rights/

No great way to block a smart knife

There are a lot of bullshit videos on YouTube. This one seemed a bit more realistic. What to do, and not to do, perhaps, if you bring bubblegum to a knife fight, or vice versa.

KFM

Some girl's got me thinking about kungfu fighting. As far as named styles go, the last one to catch my attention was Keysi Fighting Method. I watched a few silly videos on YouTube to learn more about it - I got that the pensador position is important, but there did not seem to be much information on how one protects the core and groin.

The answer was more obvious as soon as I rewatched the clips from which I originally learnt of the existence of KFM some time ago - from a documentary on Nolan's Batman.



The clips apparently show the inventors of KFM assuming the pensador position *

* one palm on head, other palm on back of first hand, both elbows thrust forward to form a protective structure

and bending over to bring the pensador between one's core and the adversary. You block with your head. This is cute. (It's also a pseudo-cute martial arts idea for a pseudo-intellectual, because the pensador stance means "thinker stance.") Aside, they also do the obvious, and pivot the groin away from the adversary in a straight fight, unlike in the silly MMA videos where they appear to be often in a missionary position while fighting. (Yeah, grappling, whatever... I'm sure it has its virtues.)

KFM style assumes a lot of power, or rather, it provides many options for the free use of powerful moves. In order to ever do anything like that, I would need to bench / crunch a lot more weight, :P, or do the equivalent bodyweight conditioning. The latter is probably preferable.

Current mathematical references

I started out the year on statistics, but segued into mathematics because of the way probability distributions are quantified using integrals. I am weak in both (by any serious standard) and have much to catch up on.

I have mostly been using the Concise Oxford Dictionaries of statistics, and mathematics, respectively, and Wikipedia. Additionally, I have Mathematics: its Content, Methods and Meaning (A,K,L), and a few other paper books lying around. Various digital resources have been available via the Internet. Some have been downloaded as ebooks.

In the current reading on binomial coefficients, I remembered to check Wolfram MathWorld, and found that its articles are quite succinct, and insightful, in their threading together of related and dependent subjects. It appears that some articles are written wholly by an individual, and may thus be benefited by a unifying clarity of form. It turns out that the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics is of the same original source as MathWorld.

Via MathWorld, I discovered today that there is such a thing as The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, for all you number theory nuts out there. The Wikipedia list of online encyclopedias lists a few other sites. EqWorld is delightful to me, as I have formalist tendencies - so this should be a good reference. PlanetMath is also interesting because some articles have a "Properties" section at the top, which shows more explicit relations offhand.

Much to do. Much to do. I only hope I get to do it, before the next commercial adventure befalls me.

From scratch with the violin

This afternoon, I opened up the violin that mother left me, for the second time since it passed to me. She said, she was growing to weak to play it, so I should take it. I did.

Given that sound travels very well within the block of flats that I live in, I close my front door. For future practice, I might close the balcony door at the other end of the flat, and enclose myself in the bedroom for further insulation. The violin will probably be audible to all adjacent units, but at least I can try to keep it down. The application of a folded business card to the strings, between the bridge and the fine-tuners, does not seem to have much of a muting effect, though I suppose I will become more sensitive to the difference eventually.

What I find strange is the requirement to use the fourth finger to play both the fourth and fifth note in each position. I am also unclear on differences in how the bow should be oriented against the violin, when the bow is touching the violin strings near the bow's frog (base), and when it touches the violin strings near the bow's tip.

I need more practice at doing all this. I have non-trivial practice with a guitar, but not a strong classical background in any instrument. I will need to study more tutorials on form, and watch professionals manage their posture. Youtube should suffice for that.

These seem to be the basics.



This focuses on bow-to-arm orientation.



This is a detailed look at left-hand position. (Can't be embedded.)

This is a detailed look at holding the bow.



My right pinky has a limited range of movement since it is shorter and has a fused joint (it is reattached) and so, figuring out how to work around that will be interesting.

Meanwhile, just doing basic percussive rhythms, fifths, chromatics, and little undulations, is fun... essentially playing stupid drama / rock music before I get fuller control over the instrument.

And already, it is time for dinner.

Electrical lighting optimisation

The flat I am living in came entirely with cheap 2-foot and 4-foot T8 fluorescent lighting fixtures. Electricals were one of the first aspects I had taken care of, so I had the least work put into it. Later, I started to wonder what alternatives could be used with these fixtures.

T8 Fluorescent Bulbs versus Fitted LED Lamp Replacements

T8 light bulbs are really, really cheap. On the order of MYR 2.80 for a 2-foot (18 W) tube. It turns out that you can get LED replacements for T8 fixtures which consume about half the wattage for the same lumen output, which cost on the order of MYR 42. (Caveat: figures from the UK, we may not have these in Malaysia.) So at the electricity cost of 0.26 MYR/kWh, at usage of 4 hours/day, you're saving about MYR 3.42 / year.

It would take 11.5 years to recover the cost of the LED light. But that's a somewhat naive calculation. Assuming that the T8 system has additional costs, for the ballasts and starter, say of MYR 1 / year, and you do have to replace the bulb once every 5 years, that brings our total cost of T8 hardware over 11 years to MYR 20 - now given those assumptions, it'll only take 6.4 years for your to pay off the cost of an LED lamp replacement.

DIY LED Lamp Replacement?

I did some quick searches, and it seems that you can order bags of white LEDs, of various warmths and beam angles, from China, starting at about MYR 0.06 each, for minimum quantities of a thousand pieces, before shipping. These would each run at 3.0-3.5 V and 15-20 mA, or 0.45-0.70 W. Bear in mind that the effect of stringing them together, and the requirement for further circuitry, would add to costs, as well as power consumption.

Back of the napkin calculation: assuming a 9 W LED lamp is what you want, you're looking at soldering or breadboarding 100-200 LEDs together. Ouch - what a pain. But worth it as a hobby, perhaps. No wonder the commercially produced equivalents are so expensive. On the other hand the cost for LEDs alone should then be on the order of MYR 7-15, which is a lot cheaper than an off-the-shelf 9W LED lamp for a T8 fixture (again, which may not be available in Malaysia).

A techie cousin has also suggested LED strips, but those do not seem price competitive.

Noobish hackery

T8 Fluorescent lights are big, bright, aimless installations. I was wondering about devices for controlling the flow of light, so that instead of a single brightly lit area, I would be able to get many dimly lit areas, from a single lamp.

I was thinking of tubular structures. The first devices that turned up close in function were acrylic light tubes, that they use to transfer daylight from the surface of buildings, into the insides of buildings, such as subway stations. Acrylic tubes refract light, and result in a rather efficient transfer.

If instead you want to reflect light through a tube, your options start to dwindle. Even normal glass mirrors reflect only 90-95% of available light, per bounce, when new. (Side note: I didn't realise that these days, they don't often use mercury on mirrors - instead they're using aluminium or silver, with a few other layers of stuff for bonding the reflective layer.) Besides a glass mirror inner-tube, which is probably not an easy DIY option, flat white paints, and reflective mylar offer high degrees of reflectivity. (Another side note: it turns out that if you search for reflective surfactants on the Internet, the main demand for such stuff is from people growing marijuana at home.)

So, given limited options, being a bored smart-ass on vacation, I walked over to the largest hardware store on my street. I bought some junction connectors, and a 20-foot-long, 4-inch-thich, white PVC pipe, the kind usually used for waste water in Malaysian residences. I soon realised that this would not fit up the stairwell to my flat, so I had to saw it into two. After cleaning the pipes, I waited till nightfall, stuck a 10 W yellow CFL tube down one end of one pipe, and turned it on. I got a big yellow glow at one end, and a dim cast of light on the other. #fail.



I haven't tried painting the insides of the pipes yet - I may later. I am still looking for reflective mylin - the only place I have seen it for sale at a reasonable price around here, is on emergency camping blankets. Techie cousin has suggested chrome paint. I will have to look into that. Meanwhile, I am thinking to saw up the pipes, and to use them for the construction of relatively boring light defusal structures.

Optimisations

One can spend time on the pursuit of cash inflow (sales), or on reducing cash outflows, or on both. I typically focus on one or the other at a time. The period 4Q2007-1Q2012 was characterised by my trying to do both at the same time, while pursuing my studies. From March 2012, I severely deprioritised sales activity, and diverted my time to research, and minimising the cost of my daily operations. Here are some of the measures I employ:

Internet access

Cost of data has been covered in the previous post. With what data I have, my usage pattern is as follows.

Email: I use a static HTML web client, for proximity to the full-blown AJAX feature set of my email provider. To check email, I just hit a static link, or press F5 if the link is already open. Consumption of data come to typically 10-30 KB - quite a bit more it would be if I used a desktop client, but I do not check email on a minute-to-minute basis, and the ease of staying on the miminal cloud is worth it.

Chat: I use a desktop client to interface with instant-messaging services. I was on mobile.twitter.com, with profile images turned off, until my Twitter account was suspended. Previously, Twitter's mobile site was quite heavy, and dabr.co.uk provided roughly what Twitter's mobile site does now.

News: I use the web client of an RSS aggregator service. Again, minimising desktop clutter, and staying away from the website clutter of most online content providers. For the sites I wish to check directly, such as Bloomberg and Business Insider, I have them bookmarked to be accessed via Google's Web Transcoder. If you've never heard of it, you have to check it out. (I also have a bookmarklet that sends sites to GW-Transcoder (there's another, unrelated, entity called GW-Toolkit). Reading web content this way brings down the cost of accessing a website, often by a factor of ten.

Static references: I have been using Pocket since it had another name, and have found this to be an excellent way to store a textbook-sized block of website references, such as wiki pages, for offline reading. I have over five thousand pages bookmarked this way, and stored on my tablet and my phone. Desktop storage is also available, but I have too many hardware devices at this point, to require that. (On a side note, I bought a tablet 1.5 years ago because GoodReader for iOS provided the best way to annotated PDF documents. Between GoodReader and Pocket, that's 80% of what the productivity gains I get from using a tablet - syncing documents to the cloud, and editing them locally in a reliable fashion, remains, of course, one of the defining challenges of this hardware form-factor.)

I don't do much else on the Internet.

Food

Here are some aspects of how I deal with this major chuck of living costs. It's quite close to the guidance of "eat real food, not too much, mostly plants," with some numbers and tweaks thrown in to accomodate my high-protein requirements. All nutritional research said and done, I focus on the following heuristics.

(0) Dichotomy: minimise the purchase of processed food whenever possible.

(1) Scalar: maximisation of protein mass/price, or the quantity of protein I can obtain per Ringgit. Soya beans seem to offer peak value - I cook and eat them whole, since processed soy products are often lacking in density. I do eat meat. Frozen fish and tuna are easily obtained, occasional cans of tuna and sardines, dried anchovies (classical food of the Malay archipelago), chicken eggs by the 25-tray, frozen beef (or buffalo) imported from India, chicken keels (breasts on the bone) for protein density, and thighs for flavour (though I have not been able to quantify whether thighs offer more protein-per-price), etc. Pork is usually sold in an annexe of the large low-price supermarkets where I usually shop, and I rarely make the effort to home-in on it.



(2) Distribution: maximising colour, and species diversity - that's the variety of colours that my food comes in, and the variety of organismal species which provide it. (Point of interest: many varieties of green vegetables actually belong to the same species - check out the table of Cruciferous vegetables, by genus and species, on Wikipedia.)



(3) Distribution: observe a traditional "balanced diet," within the class structure of carbohydrates, proteins, fats, fibre, and vitamins. See, (3) is so abstract.

Residence and transportation

For many years, I rented in the cities of Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya, and commuted to work mostly by public transport, or on foot whenever that was possible. Finding a property in the city, that was cheap enough to purchase, was out of the question, since the career strategy which I was tracking did not offer much financial remuneration. However, at some point, resources were available for the purchase of a little car, and there were some social and commercial advantages to be obtained from this - so I bought a 15-year-old car for MYR 5,300. That being done, shopping for cheaper properties to rent or buy became a larger focus, as the reach of my travels was now far greater.

Residence: The saga of purchasing a property will be left out here, but to-date, I have secured residence (at least temporarily) in a location 25 kilometres from the Kuala Lumpur city centre, at a very low cost, relative to living in the city. It is an 800+ square-foot flat, fully maintained by myself, and it has been fun learning how to fix piping, caulk roof tiles, etc. Dishes are washed by hand. Clothes are washed in a machine, partially dried on hangers, then finished off in a dryer. Clothes are then sorted and stored in bins for reach-in access, under a hanger made from slotted angles.











Utilities: Internet access has been covered amply above and elsewhere. Electricity is partially subsidised by the government, and so is water. I have not yet been here long enought to obtain stable data on my usage patterns, but for the first month, when I moved in, I had to pay only some MYR 42.30 for electricity and water. Cooking gas (a propane and butane mixture costing MYR 1.90/kg) is also subsidised by the government, and I am curious to know how long a tank will last - I cook meals one to three times a day.

Transportation: The bus from my town to the city costs MYR 6 - and I live some distance from the bus stop, so this will not be a frequent option. I have a bicycle, and enjoy cycling to the shops in this town, Bandar Sungai Long, and to those in the adjacent township of Bandar Mahkota Cheras. Back to mein kleinen auto, I would actually be quite happy to park and ignore the car for weeks on end, as I have in the past. But the electricals and gas lines do not seem to function reliably upon ignition, if I do not drive it frequently. At this point, I have just had the alternator and battery replaced, and I intend to take the car for a short drive every two days or so.