Oat milk cappuccinos in LA

I’m trying to collect a list of coffee places that have good oat milk cappuccinos and this is for Los Angeles:

Good
– Little Ripper Coffee, this has been my favorite find so far. The cappuccinos are great plus the staff here is very friendly. I also had a veggie sandwich here and that was well composed.
– Sqirl, great food and a very delicious cappuccino. This is one of the best cappuccino I’ve had.
– Tartine, good cup of coffee. The oat milk is very well frothed and I enjoyed the whole cup.

Not worth it
– gget, I waited too long for their homemade oat milk.

You can more of my reviews on Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=Mywjhx_fsJwGmA32MS3ruw&utm_source=ishare

Me eating a cream roll in the desert

My first attempt at an Angel Food Cake

When I used to work at Outbound, I would go to a nearby shop to get some cake as an afternoon treat. I’m forgetting the shop’s name and they’ve closed down since.

The cake was a soft, simple, and fluffy angel food cake. The past few days I’ve been in the thanksgiving mood where the autumn leaves 🍁 are falling and the weather is getting just cold enough to make me feel cozy in my apartment. So, I decided to make a cake, this is my first attempt at this so it didn’t turn out so well.

Things I would change:
1. Fluff up the eggs enough to make the cake keep that consistency. 2. Read the instructions properly.
3. Waste less eggs.

Ugh, gone is my server again!

I made the same mistake I made some time last year where I accidentally made it impossible for me to log in to my digital ocean box. Last week, this happened with my go.mhmd.us server. Which means I will have to start from scratch on some setup there, but this time, I’ll be more careful and I’ll document things as well.

I’ve started using bash and ruby scripts more often to do some repetitive tasks, maybe this will be a good place to try this.

So yes, all go.mhmd.us links will break now and I’m not going to try fixing them right now. I will go on with something else…

Dark mode in 1 step

This should work relatively well for most websites:

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
  body {
    filter: invert(1);
    background: #000;  /* since most sites declare the background color */
  }
}

This will work pretty well for most sites unless your site has a lot of images.

Examples

If your images are inverted like reddit above, use the following:

img {
  filter: invert(1); /* flips it back */
}

I really wanted to like Outlander

So I’m thinking about how some time last year, I tried watching Outlander. The beginning of the show is amazing, premise and environmental setup of the whole show is amazing but something got me to stop watching it. I’ve thought a lot about what this something was and it’s mostly that there were just too many damn rape scenes and gore from unnecessary things like the main character getting whipped on screen for a solid two minutes was not something I wanted to watch.

I really wanted to like it but I just can’t go back to watching it. I got about 7 episodes in before quitting on one half way through.

Book review: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

I recently finished this book and I am going to summarize some of my thoughts in a concise list below:

  • The book has great writing
  • The buildup in the book is pretty amazing but there is no climatic part
  • Characters are pretty well developed even if a bit hard to relate to
  • About 3/4th the way in, Mrs. Montague is added but no real plot or character development is done by this
  • It’s clear this book can be an influence for many movies and books that came after it

Overall, this book is a 3 out of 5 stars, in my opinion.

October update

I’ve been busy the past month with work and when not working staying away from the computer. I want to highlight some changes to my daily routine and also update on some books I’ve read or listened to recently.

About 2 years ago when Kristen and I adopted our dog Samson, I started waking up early with him because he had some magical internal circadian rhythm telling him to wake up around 7am. This was new to me and I had a tough time getting used to the first few months. But as time went on, I started to go to sleep earlier to accommodate waking up early. Nowadays, I’m automatically waking up around 7am and taking Samson on a walk.

This has also led me to be mindful about what I do with my time at night. One main change being that I’ve stopped browsing the Internet on my computer. The last time I interact with my MacBook is either if I get a Pagerduty alert from my work or when I leave work around 5-6pm.

And so because I’m not on my computer, I’ve started reading more or on days when I’m feeling lazy, I’ll play video games but the main goal is to not be reading random blog posts or new articles on my computer. And that reminds me, I’ve read and listened to quite a few books since I last posted so I’ll cover those below.

Books
I’ve been pretty diligent about reading books and listening to audiobooks. Any spare moments I’ve had, I try to read. The book I’m struggling through right now is The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Mainly because it’sa horror book that I don’t like reading before sleep 😴. Below are short reviews on recent books. Headphones 🎧 means I listened to the audiobook version.

  • Dune by Frank Herbert, a classic sci-fi epic that keeps you wanting more. It’s definitely worth a read to see where other sci-fi worlds like Star Wars might get some influence.
  • The Body by Bill Bryson 🎧 a fun listen most of the way, gets a bit depressing and unavoidable by the end. Bryson covers the whole body and its many functions and shortcomings. Narrated by Bryson himself! I highly recommend this one. Probably one of my favorite listens of the year.
  • Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell. I am not a huge Gladwell fan but this one I was able to get through the whole way and I did like some points that he made, especially the fact that most people default to truth when talking to strangers and familiars alike.
  • The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman 🎧. This I’m only posting because I didn’t like the book at all. I had a hard time getting through the whole book.

Right now, I’m still making good progress toward my goal of 24 books read by the end of the year. I don’t include audiobooks as part of that list. I’m currently at 23 books! So close!

Samson’s Halloween costume

Reverting to an old school way of posting

I don’t like the WordPress editor, even with its features that are probably the best in the industry, I don’t find myself craving to write in it. The main reason for me is that the features get in my way, I have to hide away all the UI cruft to be able to write. So, I was thinking of how I liked posting, almost 10 years ago. This was back on my favorite blogging platform, Posterous. That was through email, so I started thinking if it’s possible to do that with WordPress, turns out, it’s very much possible using Jetpack’s ability to write from email. So I’m trying that right now, this was posted with email.

I’m sure when there are posts that require more organization, I’ll write using the block editor (Gutenberg) but for a lot of my posts, they should be pretty simple so I wanted to try this.

Update: so it looks like it worked well! There is a link to Posterous and that carried over fine. I’ll be posting more like this now.