Charles came up last night for dinner and general hanging-out. We spent a little time on my new kitchen acquisitions- a Rancilio Silvia espresso maker and associated Rocky grinder (photos here). I think this is a current icon of the techno-yuppie set- the combination is not cheap ($700 for the pair), there are numerous instructions around for hacking Silvia with excruciatingly accurate temperature controllers, it delivers addictively good cappuccino, and there’s plenty of room for nerding out at even higher levels.

Charles brought up another techno-yuppie item, a Nikon D100 digital SLR. I love the feel of an SLR, even though it took me a minute to remember how to manually zoom (“where’s the zoom buttons?”). But I’m really not looking forward to learning yet another interface, and retooling for bigger image files. Access to RAW files is attractive, though; the ability to change exposure and white balance in Photoshop, versus in real-time on the camera, is WAY cool. Time-consuming, but cool.