Where’s the peanut butter?!

last night was the second to last step in my first batch of beer! the primary and secondary fermentations seemed to go well and the only thing standing between me and 48 bottles of what i’m christening the thomas muir ale is now a few short weeks while the priming sugars kick the yeast back into gear and the pressure builds in the bottles. i ran the syphon while tanya worked the capper and the assembly line worked pretty well. a few things i’ll try to do differently on the next batch include…

• time - brewday took a lot longer than i expected! a lot of this had to do with getting 5 gallons of water to boil, but planning on it taking 5 hours rather than about 3 will definitely help.
• syphoning tips - during tre transfer from the primary fermenting bucket to the glass carboy in week 1, i actually stuck my hand in the beer once. luckily i had managed to dump a ton of bleach on myself shortly beforhand so the effects on the batch should be minimal. right??
• bottling is messy business - i probably spilled a bottle worth of beed on our kitchen floor. oops!

brewing beer is a totally fun experience and surprisingly scientific process that i would encourage anyone to try. now i just hope this first round of scottish ale is half worthy of its namesake.

href="http://24ways.org/advent/swooshy-curly-quotes-without-images">The problem

“Challenge” would be more accurate, but anyway the proposed
solution works pretty well after some additional blockquote
tweaks.

i noticed something interesting on my way to the bus this morning. i’m passing the budget car rental when I spy this woman across the street. she’s probably in her mid 50s or so and bursting at the seams with smiling, walking tall, mary tyler moore confidence. it was the flying white-puffballs that attracted my attention. they turned out to be her hands in oversized mittens with a huge fluffy trim. then I took in the whole experience. she had on bright red fleece pants, one of those outlaw josey wales ponchos with fringe reaching from her waist to her knees (same red fleece), and a matching hat with an 8-12″ brim. and she was sporting late 70s 3″ lens sunglasses. it was awesome. then I had to ask myself “when was the pimp wardrobe co-opted by the elders among us?” the masters’ tools will never bring down the master’s house.

I got the href="http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2103922&cp=&kw=2133&parentPage=search">6-in-1
Kameleon universal remote from Radio Shack a couple weeks ago
(also known as the URC-8060) and have been very happy with the
results. The remote controls my TV, 5 disc changer/5.1 sound system,
Windows Media Center (but only by training on the buttons I want it to
learn), and xbox. My TV remote is sort of universal, meaning it can
mostly control my xbox (but can’t traverse up a directory in xbox
media center) and it controlled an old Sony home theater system but
cannot control my new Samsung system, and my home theater system
remotes have also been semi-universal. The net is that until getting
this new universal remote, I’ve needed 2-3 to control my four devices.
No more!

The one major drawback with the Kameleon is its light up screen and
vibration sensitivity. It is designed to turn on its display backlight
when it detects movement (when you’re using it) but the movement
detection is so sensitive it just winds up burning through batteries
every couple months. Worse, when the batteries are getting low, it
doesn’t die like a normal remote where you gradually lose
range. Instead the Kameleon choses to occassionally lock up and
brightly illuminate all the buttons, but with no obvious range
degradation. David Pollard was kind enough to href="http://kameleonrc.blogspot.com/">find and post a solution to
this annoyance - basically you open up the remote and cut the
vibration sensor connection. Once this is done, to turn on the
backlight you first press a button (which is thankfully processed only
as “turn on the screen” and not “turn on the screen and do whatever I
happen to press”) and you’re in business.

Zippity-do-dah! I’m all jiggy with real href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha">captchas now (courtesy
of the fine folks at href="http://www.captchas.net">capthcas.net) and use them for
comment verification. Give it a try!

some ideas for holiday giving:

• give donations - heifer international let you “buy” animals for people who need and can use them. does your kid need an ipod more than a sense of connectedness with the external world? forget what he tells you…
• give experiences - subscriptions, lessons, concert tickets, or parties extend the giftgiving cycle beyond one day. do not confuse this with a gift card, though. give money before you give gift cards.
• thanks, for inspiration
• something you made - it’s like junior high shop for adults and whoever you give it to is almost sure to at least get a laugh out of it.
• things with reusable wrapping - wrapping paper is a huge waste. try paper that might be reused or a nice bag.
• other things not easily classifiable as “more stuff”

Why didn’t I install cygwin ages ago? For some stupid reason I
struggled to set up my own sshd outside of what cygwin would give me
and used the native xemacs rather than cygwin’s (here because I really
couldn’t use cygwin very easily at work) and for over a year have
suffered with not being able to start xemacs in a shell since -nw
support from the native install to putty doesn’t work very
well, though the cygwin binaries work just fine. And it GIVES me
xemacs, ssh, aspell, and all this other cool stuff. And now I’m
typing in xemacs two ssh sessions away - something I doubt I could
have done before. It’s awesome.

once in a while an album comes out with opening chords or a general structure that immediately evoke a feeling of despondence in me in the best possible way. “continuous hit music” which kicks off American Analog Set’s Promise of Love is such a song. its beauty in simplicity is totally disarming. was i in the middle of a difficult game of sudoku? some interesting work? out at a bar with friends? (or, this track would never come on in a bar) the context is irrelevant and immediately washed away. there are other songs like Wilco’s Via Chicago which also impart despondence, but subtly more direct and deeper yet less personal due to the narrative. “i dreamed about killing you again last night and it felt alright to me” is replaced with anything and nothing when listening to American Analog Set’s despondence. growing up i surrounded myself with music and friends who shared my passion for music and i’m not moderately saddened that these days it plays such an auxiliary role in my personal and public lives.

Damn - this has been a big year for Yahoo! href="http://www.psoul.com/index.cgi/computers/upcoming.html">Two
months ago they acquired href="http://upcoming.org/">upcoming.org, a couple months before
that they picked up flickr, and href="http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2005/12/yahoo.html">today it’s
del.icio.us. Congratulations to the del.icio.us folks and it’s
ought to be super cool to see wehre Yahoo take all this stuff.

I’ve been sick lately and unable to sleep so this morning I set up href="http://marginalhacks.com/Hacks/DaVite/">DaVite from Marginal
Hacks - a free, perl based system for running your web based
invitation system. So far I’m super happy with the results. If
you’ve got a host that can run cgi, it’s worth checking out.