Delicious Tea

On a more upbeat note, compared to the previous entry, I've recently been experimenting with tea. You see, I've always been somewhat fond of tea, but finding the perfect method of preparing and serving it has eluded me in the past. I find drinking it straight to be nice, but somewhat unsatisfying; it always ends up tasting a bit plain and dry. I've tried loading it up with sugar, but that really doesn't improve things much, and isn't the healthiest thing in the world either, especially as I've made this recent move in an attempt to move away from drinking juice and all its unneeded calories. I've tried adding a bit of milk, but besides changing the colour it never seemed to add much to the experience, and certainly fell far short of delivering on the promise of adding richness and creaminess to my freshly brewed drinking experience.

Of course, I contrast this with tea experiences that have been wholly satisfying, namely those times I've had a chai latte at a coffee shop. It wasn't until a few days ago that I finally put the pieces together and came to a revelation: I was using far, far too little milk.

While watching a barista prepare a chai latte this summer, I noticed that the ratio of tea to milk was close to 2:1, rather than the usual middling teaspoons added to a standard cup of tea. I didn't think much of it at the time, as I assumed they were using a much stronger mix of tea than I might hope to brew at home, but on a lark I decided to try it.

After a bit of tinkering, this is the winning algorithm I came up with: In a 600ml mug, brew approximately 400ml of tea with a single tea bag per the package directions. Spiced teas work especially well, and herbals might also be nice though I haven't tried yet. Once the tea is brewed, chuck the teabag and immediately top up the mug with 200ml of whole milk, fresh from the fridge.

This results in a deliciously creamy tea beverage that's at a drinkable temperature immediately upon preparation, which is another bonus.

Even with the whole milk, a mug full only adds up to about 120 calories or so, which is about half of what I'd get from a glass of juice. There's also a lot more of it in a mug, so I can easily get by with just one or two per day, rather than 3 or 4 glasses of juice, to sate my thirst. That said, it's quite a bit more than the roughly zero calories I'd get from plain tea, but I think it's definitely worth it.

With all this calorie talk I should mention that I'm not freaking out about weight or anything. It's just, on the balance, I'd rather spend my daily calorie intake budget on delicious things I enjoy eating, rather than waste it on things that bring me no joy.

Please DIAF, Flash Plugin

So last night as I was settling down getting ready for bed, I decided to watch a few youtube videos to close out the day, as I often do. Additionally, as is common for these late night viewings, I hit the "full screen" button on youtube's controls.

Now, for most people, clicking a button marked "full screen" would imply some sort of desire to watch a video in full screen perhaps. Not according to Adobe, though. For them, hitting "full screen" means "crash the computer and force an instant reboot". Thanks, Adobe.

As a result of this, my root drive became unrecoverably corrupted (I'll put some of the blame on Apple's FS team for that part, journaled filesystems should never die like that). Thankfully my Time Machine backups came to the rescue and I didn't lose any data, but all the same it was a pain in the ass and kept me up well past my intended bed time.

On the bright side, when I logged in to post this I noticed that Blogger has added mobile device templates, which I took the opportunity to enable. As such, my blog should now be much easier to navigate from handheld devices. Now if only they could do something about improving the mobile posting experience...