Category: Life

Sometimes, I feel the need to talk about me (imagine that).

Yunnan Jig Tea from Adagio Tea

As mentioned previously, I signed up with Adagio Teas for their Link Reward offer. Over the weekend I received an email from one of their reps, thanking me for the link and saying that my reward was on the way. Privately, I was having doubts as my track record with freebies, trial offers and rebates is extremely poor.

Then today after a pretty average day at the office, I got home to find that my doormat was hiding something. The first thought in my head was “I wonder what eBay auction Ariesna won this time?” Much to my delight, my first thought was wrong and instead I was holding a package from Adagio! I hurried inside, tossed the groceries into the fridge and cracked open the box. I was most pleased to find that an 8oz tin of yunnan jig tea and one of Adagio’s IngenuiTEA teapots. After taking the IngenuiTEA out of the box and plastic wrapping, I could feel that the plastic it’s made of has a solid feel to it; so I don’t think I’ll be accidentally breaking it any time soon. Still, if I were going to purchase one of these things, I think I would prefer the main body be made of a heavy-duty glass. *shrug* I don’t know that glass would really work any better but it would give the IngenuiTEA a better heft and feeling of quality. Still, it looks to be a quality product and it’s definitely a very clever idea. You toss your loose tea leaves into the IngenuiTEA, fill it with hot water, wait for it to brew and then set it on top your cup. The IngenuiTEA will then drain your fresh cup of tea into the cup for you; while automatically straining out the leaves. If you’re still confused; go watch the flash video on their website and it’ll all make sense.

Adagio has this to say about their yunnan jig tea:

Black tea from the Yunnan region of China. Yunnan tea is easily identified by its luscious soft leaves, and a unique peppery taste. It is a very forgiving tea; will not taste bitter when over-steeped. Yunnan tea is arguably the most underrated of Chinese varieties. If you have yet to try it, we would recommend it highly. Our ‘Yunnan Jig’ would make a great introduction.

I found it slid smoothly across the palate. When it initially hits the tongue there’s an earthy flavor to it, but swirling it around in my mouth for a bit that flavor settles down to be more smoky than earthy. After swallowing the tea, there’s a slight but distinct hint of black pepper. The first cup I made was too hot, so I threw a bit of ice in it but the tea tasted… off once it was cold. It wasn’t just being watered down; it just didn’t taste right. On the 2nd cup, I was more careful on how hot I let the water get and this time drank the tea without ice. That worked considerably better and I’d definitely recommend this to anybody who enjoys drinking black tea.

So the final verdict? Adagio seems to be a very cool company with tasty tea and a nifty gadget for brewing the tea up. Does this mean CoffeeBear.net will become TeaBear.net? No, but I’ve no doubt I’ll be buying more tea from them once this sample runs out (some of those green teas and the flavored teas sounds really good.). 🙂

This afternoon while I was home for lunch, I noticed that SuSEWatcher was showing this icon: There are new security updates available; hardware detection is idle.

This means that there are new security updates available. I launched YOU to get the new updates and noticed it was an updated kernel. I didn’t think much beyond that and let YOU do it’s thing. But after I rebooted I couldn’t get into my Linux install; it looks like some of the kernel modules didn’t get installed correctly. Specifically the one for the filesystem that my harddrive is formatted in. *grumpf* I’m doing research online to figure out how to revert back to a previous kernel to fix this.

That was the bad news. The good news is I got a bit ornery with my iPod not syncing with iTunes & fought with it again. After getting several BSODs, I just randomly decided to plug the iPod back into the onboard firewire port and for whatever reason it worked! Wheee! Now if I could just get my Linux install fixed; I’d be a happy camper…. At least until the next computer screw up!

I’ve not been posting around here in a while and mostly it’s been do to a lack of *umpf*. The way work’s been going of late has strongly discouraged my creative urges and since I have no desire to get dooced I can’t really talk about that much. I’ve been doing some job hunting but that’s slow going as there aren’t too many jobs around here that I’m qualified for and that wouldn’t totally suck (e.g. 2nd shift & a pay-cut).

Still, life isn’t all bad. Ariesna and I are getting married in a little over a month from now1 and I’ve got all the parts of my outfit. That’s right no simple tux for me but rather a modern kilt with a formal jacket and all the trimmings. I’ve tried the lot on and you’ll have to forgive me but I think it looks rather sharp. 🙂

Also, I’ve been secretly working on a theme for WP 1.5 so when I upgrade this site; it’ll be all shiny and new. I’m holding off on the upgrade currently while I wait for some WP plugin developers make 1.5 versions of their stuff, though I’ve also started looking at alternative plugins as well.

Other than that, the only vaguely interesting thing to report is my iPod appears to have gone insane. For a while there, I couldn’t get it to work properly with iTunes and a quick peek through the Apple support forums convinced me to try an Adaptec Fireconnect 4300 PCI firewire card. That worked for a while but then Windows started blue-screening when I connected the iPod though occasionally it would work if the iPod was connected when I booted into Windows. Eventually, that stopped working but I was able to get it work with gtkpod under Linux but now even that seems to no longer work. I’ve not found anybody else with the exact same problems as I from some rather intense googling. During my last test, it looks like my Linux system got stuck in a loop trying to access the iPod; so I’ll be digging through my old receipts and seeing precisely how long ago I bought it as I did buy the extended warranty on it from Best Buy when I picked it up. I’m crossing my figures that I’m still w/in the warranty period and they’ll replace it for me. That would be pretty schweet if it happens. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see for now.

1 If you feel up to the whole gift-giving thing; we’re registered at Dillard’s, Kohl’s, Target, Walmart and Amazon.com.

The Doctor

Earlier this week the first episode of the new Doctor Who series, by the BBC, was leaked onto the internet. I was able to obtain a copy and give it a quick whirl1. I have to say that I’ve not enjoyed watched the Doctor so much since Tom Baker played him and while I still miss that massive scarf; the new Doctor’s look suits very well. At least from what one can tell in a ~40 minute episode, Mr. Eccleston seems to have captured that playfully annoying essence which is so esstenial to portraying the Doctor properly. I look forward to seeing more of this new season and hope that it will be quickly released to DVD (to make it easier to get here in the States).

1 Actually, it wasn’t all that quick as I was trying to figure a way to make the AVI file into a SVCD. I came really close with Tovid but the quality wasn’t all that great to begin with and the video was totally corrupted towards the end. Still, I did get a lot closer with Tovid’s CLI tools than with Tovid GUI, so maybe with some more work I can figure this out. That’d be great as I’d really like to burn some quick&dirty SVCDs using CD-RWs to watch various downloads on my real TV rather than my PC. What can I say, the futon is way more comfortable than my desk chair.