I wonder why coffee-machine makers think, or pretend to think, that people drink drip coffee out of tiny cups? I had to replace my so-called 4-cup machine today; I'd finally managed to forget to turn off the heat when I emptied the carafe, and it was heated empty for long enough to make me not want to trust it again. It was a long obsolete model, so no hope of just replacing the carafe; I trotted down to the local Walgreens and picked up the only model they had. The old one held 20 oz, or 5oz per 'cup;' the new one is more like 16, or 4x4oz cups, so a full pot would not fill one of my usual coffee cups even twice, though it might if I was leaving a lot of room for milk. Then the coffee manufacturers say to put in so many tbsp per 6oz cup (though a lot of Americans seem to use much less), just to confuzzle things further.
I also picked up one of those curly energy-saving lightbulbs while I was there. It claims to reproduce the look of natural daylight; it looks very cold and strange to me, particularly in the bedroom. At least, unlike the early ones, it seems to come on without any annoying hesitation. (My landlady in the late 1980's bought an early version for the staircase, once; after a few weeks of annoying us by taking forever to get bright enough to be useful, which is not what you want for a staircase light, it blew rather impressively, and we went back to using the regular kind.)
