James Zhan in real life.

16 Aug, 2026

What brought me joy

1. New coffee!

I’ve had this coffee resting for 4 weeks and it’s finally ready to be opened! Opening a new bag of coffee is always exciting. I’m a few brews in and I’ve found that I prefer it brewed with the TORCH Mountain Dripper over V60 because it gets me a bit more acidity. The fermentation notes are quite strong with this one and I’m not 100% loving it so far, though it’s highly possible that I just need to make some adjustments with my brewing.

I do wonder if the coffee grinder I use, 1ZPRESSO ZP6, is not the best for this coffee. This high-end grinder specializes in bringing the most clarity to your brews and is notorious for making unpleasant flavours in more processed beans too pronounced. And this brings me to the next thing that brought me joy—

2. Ordered a new coffee grinder (1ZPRESSO K-Ultra)!

Since discovering that different coffee grinders can give you different flavour profiles in your brews earlier this year, I’ve been mulling over getting an end-game level all-rounder coffee grinder to complement the “specialist” ZP6, which is typically the best only for light roast washed process beans.

Of course, high-end coffee grinders are expensive, and so I was hesitant to ask my wife if she’d be okay with the purchase (we share our finances)—not that she doesn’t support my coffee shenanigans, but I was just hyper-aware that, to a non–coffee snob, having multiple grinders may seem unhinged.

That bag of natural process coffee from Rogue Wave was what made me decide to finally ask my wife for her “blessing” to buy another grinder. I’ve been having such a great time with my coffee brewing and I’d really love to complete my setup to enjoy coffee even more.

Funnily enough, when I finally asked her, her responses were basically “where’re you gonna put it?” (a fair question since we’re constantly running out of space in our kitchen lol) and “what did you think I’d say? ‘No’?” That’s true love right there.

So off I went my merry way and ordered the 1ZPRESSO K-Ultra! I’ve been feeling very jazzed every time I think about it; I’m incredibly excited to get it in my hands and test it out!

3. My wife got to work from home this past week due to her work building being unavailable. Her job is normally fully on-site so it was nice to for us both to be working from home! I got to make her the coffee beverages she loves and spend more time with her.
4. I made and published a new Apple Motion tutorial on my Apple Motion channel after over 2 years of inactivity. Apple Motion is my favourite app for making motion graphics and I enjoy sharing my love for it (I’m a Final Cut Pro and Apple Motion evangelist). Making this tutorial was really fun and rewarding, and I hope to post more often going forward.
5. My in-laws were using a 25-year-old alarm system in their home by a company that no longer exists, so I helped them upgraded to the Ring alarm system. The cost is way lower and it satisfies their needs. They were quite happy with Ring’s functionalities.
6. I’ve been trying to improve my latte art and this week I poured my best one yet!

Piano

I practiced the piano 3 times this week, which was the minimum of my goal. I left it to the last 3 days of the week and I don’t feel too good about it. The good thing is, the piano journal has proven to be very effective because if it weren’t for it, I would have absolutely not practiced at all this week. Going forward, I should try to front-load my practice and try to do more than the minimum.

Other stuff

• I did end up brewing the decaf beans from Propeller at 6 days off roast and it was interesting. The beans were really brittle—just as expected—and they didn’t have a whole lot of complexity. They tasted like they needed more de-gassing so I decided to give them a few more days and try again. There’s a possibility that I just don’t like this bag of decaf beans, though. It probably didn’t help that I was using a highly “analytical” grinder (the ZP6); I wonder if the new grinder (K-Ultra) will help.
• Worked out twice this week! Got real sore real fast, but that’s to be expected when you hadn’t worked out for 6+ weeks.
• I’ve been obsessed with the OSTs from the game, Hollow Knight, and the art style is incredible. Even though the game isn’t the kind that I typically play—I even asked Reddit for opinions—I’ve decided to add it to the Steam wish list and buy it when it goes on sale. I haven’t ventured out of my typical genres and maybe that’s why I haven’t been gaming at all for almost an entire year. I’d like to try something new.

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