Google Calendar has a new feature that many international Mozillians may like: It can now display more than one time zone at a time. In my case, lining up the Central European and Pacific time zones next to each other comes in quite handy:

Of course, when entering a new event, it does not seem to allow selecting the time zone this refers to quite yet, let’s hope that’ll be fixed in a future iteration.

My colleague Dave made a little Google Maps mashup, illustrating where in the world Mozilla employees are. The result is quite an impressive map:

Over at Dave’s blog, you can actually zoom in to see more closely where people are. The one in Munich, Germany, is yours truly, by the way.

In a few weeks, my fiancée and I are going to move to Munich. We are going to live in a quarter called Sendling.

A U-Bahn stop in the neighborhood is called “Am Harras” and curious as I am I wanted to know what it was named after. Luckily, there’s always Wikipedia. The German Wikipedia page on Harras reads (my translation):

In 1856, the former Löwenhof castle was torn down [...] and a remaining part of it was purchased by Robert Harras who opened a café there. It became a popular destination for people in Munich. The café was torn down as well in 1903, but the name remained as the name of the square located there. In 1930, the intersection was named after the café owner Robert Mathias Harras.

When I asked other people, one initial thought was that the name could be from Carl Zuckmayer‘s 1946 play “Des Teufels General” (The Devil’s General), about a German air force general under the Nazi regime, both working for it and openly opposing the Nazi party. But, while this would have made sense, it turns out the square has been called like this much longer already, and the fictitious general and the former café owner have nothing in common but their last name.

Photo: Harras post office, in a building from the 1930s. CC by-sa licensed on Wikimedia Commons.

I hereby admit publicly: I love espresso. I firmly believe, all a young coffee bean hopes for as a child is to end up as a delicious little Italian coffee. Needless to say, one of the hardest decisions for me to make when thinking about our kitchen setup was, what espresso maker to get.

Now we recently went to Italy on vacation and as usual I admired the baristas and their fabulous espresso makers, and so we ended up asking one of them where to go to buy a good espresso maker. And a decent tamper, and — for my parents — a good coffee mill. Like most Italians he and his fellow bar owner felt honored and delighted to give advice and gave us the address of their commercial coffee maker vendor, along with this note card:

It reads: “From Luca and Fabio. Treat them well.” Very nice!

There, I bought one of the most beautiful espresso makers evaar:

The “La Pavoni Europiccola” does not have an electric pump and thus works mainly with the pressure generated by the steaming water as well as the force from the operator’s arm pressing the handle down. On the one hand, it is hard to generate a constant quality this way and, due to temperature variations, it is quite hard to make the first coffee in a batch “just right”. On the other hand, with this machine, drinking espresso is celebrated rather than rushed, and each coffee becomes its own little “piece of art”.

While I am still figuring out the “tricks”, so far I really dig it. And one thing’s for sure: This is one damn cool kitchen accessory.